


We're dying of thirst so we feast on each other

by femvimes



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Background Vik/amara, F/F, M/M, Post-Canon, post-pacific rim uprising
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-05-18
Packaged: 2019-04-06 21:37:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 41,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14066097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/femvimes/pseuds/femvimes
Summary: Hermann Gottlieb doesn't think too much of the plan to take the fight to the Anteverse. For one thing, it means exploiting the brain of constant exasperation and love of his life Newton Geiszler. With the help of the cadets and his colleagues, Hermann is prepared to do just about anything to help Newt - including illegal internet activity and bargaining with Liwen Shao. Meanwhile, Newt watches from inside his own mind as he fights the Precursors for control. (On hiatus)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This will be canon compliant-ish. Tbh I didn't like Uprising very much, so this is more of a post-canon fix-it fic. (Title is from the Florence + the Machine music video for "Queen of Peace".)  
> 

They don’t let him see Newton at first.

He can’t get in even with his clearance, even with his “saving the world (again)” credentials. Even _Jake_ gets to see him first. Hermann asks him later how it went, voice breaking, not even caring, just please, _please, tell me how he’s doing_. Jake just scoffs and shakes his head. Nobody understands, probably because of Newt’s “trying to end the world” plan.

Hermann supposes that this is what he deserves. He imagines the whispers, _they were friends, how did he not notice?_ And _Do you think he’s evil too_? Hermann searches every corner of his brain for a trace of their influence, but he finds nothing except the nightmares. They’re getting worse lately.

Why _didn’t_ he notice? He and Newt haven’t had much contact in the last few years, despite Hermann’s repeated attempts to re-connect. That makes sense now. He analyzes every interaction with Newt leading up to his total loss of control. How much of him is still really in there? Jake and the PPDC psychologists think that he’s completely gone now. Hermann knows that this is not true. If there’s anything he’s learned over the past twenty years, it’s that Newton Geiszler is a fighter. He tried to win arguments about pop culture, how could he not fight a malignant kaiju presence in his mind?

He tries explaining to the psychologists, to the higher-ups (there aren’t many people higher than him) that he could get through to Newt, if they just let him try. He’s brushed off every time. Don’t they want Newt to get better? What’s the harm in someone who knows him talking to him?

It takes him a few days to realize that of course they don’t want the two of them together, because Newt might infect him through the drift. Hermann doesn’t care about that at this point. What scares him more is Newt facing this alone. He’d risk a little corruption just to talk Newt back from the edge.

_This has always been your problem, Newton Geiszler_ , he thinks viciously one night in his quarters. _You try and deal with things alone, and look where you end up! Maybe if you’d asked me for help we could have stopped this years ago_. Even if he hadn’t asked for help, Hermann would have offered. Again.

He lies back on his bed and winces as he jerks his neck. He still has fingerprint-sized bruises when Newt tried to strangle him. The Precursors, he reminds himself sternly. Not Newt. The only way Newt ever hurt him was with words. That should have been his first clue that Newt was not himself. Whatever happened to their gentle and not-so-gentle ribbings? All Newt had given him was dismissal. Or was that the Precursors, too? Trying to discourage him from continuing his work? That was it, had to be.

Hermann props himself up and stares across his quarters at the photograph. He’d had it on his lab desk when Newt was around, and now he has it pinned to the corkboard above his personal desk to remind himself of happier times. Someone took it with their phone seconds after the Breach had closed. It’s of him and Newt, smiling sheepishly at each other. Whoever had given it to Hermann – he couldn’t remember now – had said wistfully, “It looked like you two were sharing a really intimate moment.”

Intimate indeed. Hermann keeps thinking about a moment that had to be the real Newt peeking through, just had to be. “You should come to my place for dinner sometime.” He replays this line over and over in his head, like a tongue probing at a loose tooth. He knows Newt meant it because of how casually he said it. That was just like Newt, to ask something serious in an irreverent way. How many times had he passive-aggressively said “Uh, Hermann? If you could just stop scratching your chalk on the chalkboard that would be fucking great. Thanks bud!”. And the post-it notes! Gott in Himmel, Newt throws an arm over his eyes and smiles just thinking about them. He even found one in his supposedly secret tea-stash. _Stop drinking so much caffeinated tea, it puts you in a bad mood. – x Newt_

It says a lot about Newt that the one glimmer of humanity he has left is their flirtatious inside joke. When they both ended up back in China five years ago, Newt texted him:

 

NEWT: Looks like we’ll be in the same place for longer than a day. We should hang out some time.

HERMANN: Absolutely. Dinner?

NEWT: My place? It’s nice. Not fully unpacked yet tho

 

The excuses snowballed from there. “I can’t get away”, “work is keeping me busy”, “I’m having someone else over”. They’d seen each other a few times, of course, how could they not as deep in the industry as they were. But they’ve still never had that dinner.

Hermann wraps his cardigan around himself and falls asleep miserable for the fifth night in a row. The monsters in his dreams are starting to take on a frighteningly human shape. Hermann can’t quite make anything out, just shades of blue and twisting minds and hands at his neck.

The call wakes him only a few hours later. He muzzily rubs his eyes and swipes the hologram display to accept the message from Jules.

“Ms. Reyes? Is there a problem?” The J-Techs won’t usually contact him unless they need help with the Jaeger coding, which isn’t likely. He licks his lips a few times; his mouth is dry as…yes, chalk.

“Jake and Nate want to see you, Dr. Gottlieb,” she says. The sky behind her is bright and clear. What time is it? What did he fall asleep last night? Come to think of it, what day is it?

“Usually Iolana would contact me about that,” he says. “Is it an emergency?” He runs his hands through his hair. His undercut needs a shave. Is there time to visit the base barber in all of this?

“Nate just asked me to call you up, it’s no big deal,” Jules says. “And it’s not an emergency, but you should hurry. Shao won’t be on the base for very long, and Jake wants to see the two of you together.”

“Liwen Shao is here?” Hermann freezes, fingers mid-comb. “Look—What time is it, Ms. Reyes?”

“6 am,” she says, as if this were a perfectly acceptable time for people to be awake. She looks as fresh as morning dew. “Are you all right, Dr. Gottlieb? I can tell Nate you won’t be able to make it, but Jake really wants you there…”

“No, no, I’ll be there in just a few minutes.” He starts looking around for wherever he discarded his cane last night. “Uh. Where is it?”

“Conference Room H102,” Jules says patiently.

“Er, right. Thank you, Ms. Reyes.”

She dismisses the call before he has a chance to. All the way over in H102, huh? And whatever happened to putting things on people’s calendars? If he wants to get over there in a timely manner he’s not going to waste time getting changed. He smooths his button-down, brushes some lint off his slacks, and starts out.

If there is a point on the base that’s as far from Hermann’s room as possible, it’s H102. Huh. That has the feeling of a reference. Is that one of his, or…? No, that’s one of Newt’s. _Star Wars: A New Hope_. That’s another thing he always wanted to talk to Newt about: who gave him the right to put pop culture in Hermann’s head, and now that Hermann enjoyed it, couldn’t they please talk about it? Hermann has always been more of a _Doctor Who_ or _Star Trek_ man for science-fiction, but it’s a shame George Lucas never got to make that third trilogy, isn’t it?

It takes Hermann twenty minutes to get there, and he forgot to take his pills this morning, and his leg has been hurting more and more recently, and verdammt he’s getting old. This feeling is only exacerbated when he walks into the room with the young rangers and the baby-faced tech visionary. They all smile when he comes in. Is he just imagining things, or do the smiles not reach their eyes?

Jake directs him to a chair. Both he and Nate are standing. There are several hologram displays rotating all over the room. “Hi, Gottlieb. Sorry about the short notice on the meeting. Liwen had some great ideas she wanted to share with us before she gets back to her shareholder meetings.”

“Ah, yes, the shareholder meetings,” Hermann says, and he has trouble keeping the sarcasm out of his voice. He also has trouble not asking Jake to use his proper title. “How is breaking up your company going? It can’t be easy.”

Shao smiles secretly. “As a matter of fact, that’s what this meeting is about. With Ranger Pentecost’s plan, I won’t need to end it anymore. Just decommission the drone program.”

Hermann looks sharply at Jake. “What plan?”

Jake puts a hand to his eyes. “Oh my god, did I forget to tell you? Shit, I’m so sorry, Gottlieb. I’m running on two hours of sleep. Nate and I can give you all the points later. Here’s the TL;DR: we’re going to build ships that can traverse the Anteverse and open the Breach again. We’re getting the motherfuckers in their own home this time.”

Hermann stares at him. “I’m sorry?” he splutters. “You—you—what? Did you get clearance to go through with this? Is it just us, or are the other bases and Shatterdomes going through with this plan as well? Are you going to be deploying Jaegers, or just piloting ships? How do you plan to deal with the Breach destabilization problem?” It’s all coming back to him, everything he learned from drifting with Newton and the kaiju baby. He can feel his breath shorten. He can’t be doing this again, please, he won’t try and open this world up to the people that have hold of Newton…

Nate slaps the table. “See, that’s why I had Jules call you. I’d knew you’d be able to help us with this. We’re gonna need your knowledge of the Breach to really do this.”

Jake presses his hands onto the table and leans in. Both he and Nate are still standing. Too much nervous energy, Hermann supposes. With Marshal Quan dead, it seems like Ranger Pentecost is now in charge. Either that or Ranger Lambert, but he’s deferring to Jake for everything so far. Quite the change of tune. “You can devote all your time to Breach studies again. We’ll use Shao’s resources to design and build the ships. Jaegers won’t be much use in zero-g. It’s just us for now, but I’ve already got the PPDC go-ahead.”

“You…don’t need my help with the ships?” It’s not as if he doesn’t have files and files of prototype spaceship designs, for a happy future when the world could devote their funding to something as positive as exploration. It’s not as if he hasn’t dreamed of going to space his entire life.

Liwen turns her chair towards him. She smiles encouragingly. “You can be a consultant, Dr. Gottlieb. But we thought you’d have your hands full figuring out how to open the Breach. I’ve been looking at it for days and I still can’t figure out how Geiszler did it.”

Hermann flinches at the mention of Newt. Everyone takes it to mean that he’s afraid. Liwen’s expression turns sympathetic. She cranes her head to try and see Hermann’s bruises, but he has his top button done like usual.

“He really hurt you, didn’t he?” she asks.

“Yes,” Hermann says softly, but he doesn’t mean physically. “I-I-I suppose I can dig out my old report about our initial drift.” This he says to Jake. “We saw quite a bit of the Breach and the Anteverse then. And I still see it in my nightmares, so I’ll keep you updated about those.” Was that a quip? He finds them slipping into everyday conversation now. Is the drift bleed more prevalent when Newt is close by? Something to consider.

“That’d be great,” Jake says. “But I figured we could just ask Newt about the Anteverse.”

Hermann sits very still. “I don’t think it’d exactly be healthy to keep him thinking about that, Ranger Pentecost,” he says carefully. Good grief, Newton isn’t a television set that they can tune into to find out what the Precursors are doing. “It won’t help him to break free of the Precursors in his mind.”

Jake and Nate share a glance that Hermann doesn’t fail to notice. “That’s okay, because we were kind of hoping to keep that connection going,” Jake says.

Hermann jumps up without realizing it, and then has to lean on the table to support himself. He feels dizzy. “No. You—you can’t—”

“Be reasonable, Dr. Gottlieb,” Liwen says, but it’s as if she’s in another room, or as if Hermann’s underwater. “It’s our best way of finding out what the Precursors are planning.”

“But they’re going to kill him!” Hermann practically shouts. “Every day he’ll get further and further away from himself.”

“He’s already pretty far gone,” Jake says dismissively. Callous, how can he be so callous? “We have to do this with him still possessed. At least this way he can help us take the Precursors out.”

“No,” Hermann pants. “No, you-you’ve got to save him. I refuse to believe that he’s beyond help.”

Jake flips him a clearance card. “You better go down and see him,” he says. His eyes are deathly serious, almost sad. “Then you’ll know what I mean. He’s down in the basement. Keep going until you see the guard detail.”

Hermann stumbles backwards out of the room, not really hearing, not really seeing. There is a ringing in his ears, a fuzzy sound as if a wave of terror were about to wash over him and drag him out to sea. _Nobody_ – not the PPDC, not the Precursors, no one – is going to erase his Newton.


	2. Chapter 2

Newt’s dad and Uncle Illia had trouble getting him to learn to read English. He’d just learned to read German, and now they were making him go through it all over again? That is until he found a book at the library with the sickest cover he’d ever seen: a girl morphing into a squid. The Animorphs series had just the right amount of science, aliens, and body horror to keep eight-year-old Newt interested. Upon later reflection, that was a little young to be reading Animorphs. It was probably why the concept of the Yeerks scared him so much. He tried to imagine what it would be like to be trapped in his own mind, unable to control his body. He was terrified of slugs for years after that.

The human brain really is amazing. The subconscious goes down really, _really_ far. It kind of reminds Newt of the throat of the Breach, except his subconscious doesn’t lead to another dimension, just lots of memories he thought he’d forgotten. He finally has time to explore the memories Hermann had given him. Jesus, but the guy is repressed. It’s kind of comforting to have him in there with Newt, although his head is getting a little crowded. He’s been pushed to a tiny studio apartment in his brain and the walls are closing in.

He tries fighting the Precursors, like he has been for months, years, but everything’s a fog. He’s so tired, and his memories are so comforting. He follows them like he’s chasing a R.A.B.I.T. He can curl up inside his old lab, the most comforting place. Everything is dirty and grimy and dark and cozy. Every now and then Hermann ghosts in and out, and Newt tries to follow the sound of blackboards scraping and the smell of chalk dust, but he loses him in the maze of the Hong Kong Shatterdome hallways. And Alice is always there, bumping against the glass of her tank. She’s keeping an eye on him even in here, his safest of places.

He gets random glimpses of what the Precursors are doing with his body. Mostly they sit him in a room, the tiniest room he’s ever had to live in. They don’t let him sleep and they only eat enough to keep him alive. He doesn’t taste the food. He hasn’t tasted anything for months. As the Precursors slowly got their tentacles in his brain, they took over his parietal lobe. He’d give anything to taste some dried seaweed or Pocky sticks. Or dim sum. Just not sushi. No, he isn’t going to touch sushi ever again.

_"Newton, you’re such a…what was that delightful word you used the other day?” Hermann says disapprovingly. “Ah, yes. A ‘weeb’.”_

_Newt smiled and shot him finger guns. “You know it, baby.”_

Every now and then he finds himself in a different room, strapped to a chair, while someone interrogates him. The Precursors shout with his voice, with their own voices, all bluster about how they’re still going to take over this planet. Newt takes solace in the fact that it’s all talk. His plan— _no, no, their plan_ —failed. He was the only dumb sonuvabitch on Earth to drift with a Kaiju alone, and with him locked up the Precursors have no way in. All he has to do to keep the world safe is stay in here until he rots. He thinks he can handle that. Yeah, Geiszler, you can do that. Just do nothing. You’re good at that, right? No, you’re not good at that. You’re bad at that. Gotta stay busy.

“Are the restraints really necessary?”

That’s a familiar voice. A familiar voice, saying new words. Newt struggles to gain awareness of his body. He’s back in the interrogation chair. Kind of a kinky chair. The Precursors blink his eyes and focus on the man sitting in front of him.

Hermann. _Hermann, Hermann, man, I’m still in here, you’ve got to believe me. Can you see me behind my own eyes? I’m so far gone, Hermann, you have to help me please Hermann you’re the only one who can help me I can’t do this without you Hermann help me help me Hermann please I’m gonna be trapped in here forever Hermann please please_

Newt weeps and rages at the back of his mind, but he just can’t gain control, no matter how much he screams. The Precursors just sit there with a dumb smirk on his face. They’re making him look ugly, he’s sure. And Hermann looks so good. It’s like he’s barely aged at all. He smiles kindly, the first kindness Newt has seen on anyone’s face all week. If Newt had control over his own tear ducts he would be crying right now.

“Hello, Newton. Or should I say, hello Precursors. Do you have a name you’re going by?”

“Call me Newt,” the Precursors say brightly. Hermann scowls.

“Don’t use his words. Use your own words.”

God, that stupid British accent, Newt could get drunk off that voice.

“Can I talk to Newton, please?” Hermann asks. There’s an edge behind his words that Newt recognizes. That’s the “about to get into an argument” tone of voice. If Newt ever gets bored trying to recreate anime episodes in his head, he’s going to catalogue every Hermann Gottlieb tone of voice he can think of.

“ **Newton isn’t here anymore,** ” the Precursors say in their hivemind voice. _No, Hermann, it’s not true, I’m in here, I’m right here, I’m just stuck._

Hermann’s mouth tightens. “I refuse to believe that. You’ve just got him trapped. I don’t think you’ll be able to function without him. I saw glimpses of the real Newt, my Newt, just a few days ago. Either that or a group of kaiju asked me over for dinner, which I highly doubt.”

So Hermann had gotten his lifeline, just not in time. That was Newt’s last-ditch effort to alert him to what was going on. _You can finally meet Alice_. Please come over and notice the alien brain forcing me to drift with it. Then we can fix dinner and sit very close to each other on the couch, maybe?

“Ranger Pentecost tells me he’s planning on using you to get the Anteverse.” Hermann leans back in his chair. “I don’t think you can do it.”

Wait, what? Shit. He doesn’t remember that. Must’ve happened while he was out of it. That is a monumentally bad idea. He’s not an expert on the Breach like Hermann, but isn’t there, like, radiation over there?

“No, you can’t do it,” Hermann continues, “because your original plan was so bad. It really took you ten years to open the Breach again? Newt and I could have figured it out within a week on a limited PPDC budget. You even had access to Newt’s brain and you couldn’t do it. I know his brain his confusing, yes, but there are a lot of you—”

“ **Our plan almost succeeded!** ” the Precursors roar. “ **We were within 500 feet of the mountain! You won through sheer luck!** ”

“Yes, humanity’s gotten very lucky in the past twenty years, haven’t we?” Hermann says drily. “Or perhaps we’re just…better than you? Remember, you only almost succeeded this time because you forced a human to help you.”

Is Hermann _trying_ to rile them up? Yes. Of course. That’s exactly what he’s doing. Newton’s “arguing with Hermann Gottlieb” neural pathways are more worn than the pathway for singing the Pokèmon theme song. He could argue with Hermann in his sleep. Has done it in his sleep. Hermann’s giving him a doorway out.

Newt claws his way up the “Gottlieb/Geiszler argument” tunnel to the light of bodily control. The pathway is very small, but if he can just squeeze through…all he needs is one opportunity—

“Not even a relatively smart human,” Hermann adds like it’s an after-thought. “This one wasted his time learning about video game statistics when he could have been getting a seventh doctorate, but I think six is quite enough, don’t you?”

_There_

“I actually _was_ working on my seventh doctorate, thanks, but my brain was kind of preoccupied,” Newt snaps.

“Newton!” Hermann gasps. He gets down on his knees in front of Newt’s bondage chair.

Self-awareness rushes in. “Oh my god, Hermann,” Newt says, but his throat is trying to close shut over the words. “I’m still here, Hermann, please don’t abandon me. We can’t let them open the Breach again—”

“I know, I know.” Hermann strokes his leg and he can feel human contact again, just for a few brief seconds. “I knew you were in there.” He smiles with his stupid, beautiful, crooked mouth. Then Newt catches a glimpse of the bruises peeking out from under Hermann’s collar. His stomach drops. He hadn’t remembered the Precursors doing that until just now.

“I tried to kill you,” he whispers. _No, they tried to kill him._ “I’m so sorry, Hermann, it wasn’t me—” _Wait. More memories coming back—No, no, NO_ “Mako! Oh my god, Hermann, I killed her, I killed her—”

 Hermann puts both hands on his knees and leans forward urgently. “No, Newt, it wasn’t you. Do you understand me? It was the Precursors. It’s not your fault.”

Newt is in control of his tear ducts now and uses them to full effect. “I could have stopped them,” he sobs. “Jesus, I had ten years to stop them. I did it, I killed her. Mako, you deserved better, I’m so sorry.”

Hermann grabs his tear-stained face in his hands and lifts it up. Their eyes meet and they ghost drift for just a split-second, transparent blue swirling between them. Newt’s abject misery and Hermann’s grief tangle together, and then it’s gone. The waters close over Newt’s head and he’s falling backwards. In his anguish, he gives up control.

The Precursors jerk Newt’s head out of Hermann’s hands and try to kick out, but this is a full-on bondage chair and his legs are strapped down. That’s good, because Newt really doesn’t want to give Hermann more bruises. He’s losing awareness rapidly, and the last thing he sees before he’s shoved into his subconscious studio loft is Hermann standing and saying,

“Hang on, Newton. I will get you out of there.”

_"What kind of weaknesses do they have?” the small Japanese girl asks. Newt smiles at Ranger Pentecost, who nods, and Newt kneels in front of her._

_"It really depends on the kaiju. Sometimes they come out of the Breach and they have powers we’ve never seen before. But we can study the ones that have died and predict them that way.”_

_She clenches her fists and looks up at Ranger Pentecost. “I want to do that, Sensei.”_

_The ranger laughs. “You want to design and pilot Jaegers too, Mako. You can’t do all three.”_

_So this is the ranger’s adopted daughter that everyone’s heard so much about. Before the ranger left Alaska to sign the adoption papers in Japan, he sent out a broadcast along with a photograph. “Attention Anchorage Shatterdome. This is my new daughter, Mako Mori. She’s going to be living with us.” A ‘dome-wide “look at my kid!” picture. You had to love Stacker Pentecost. He was showing a sweet side of himself. No wonder Hermann had such a big crush on the guy._

_Newt winked at Mako. “Don’t listen to him, kid. You can do whatever you want, especially if you start this young. Come down to my lab any time if you want to see some dead kaiju bits.”_

_Ranger Pentecost scowled down at him. “Not encouraging disobedience in Ms. Mori, are you, Dr. Geiszler?”_

_Newt jumped up. “N-no, sir.”_

_The ranger cracked a smile. “With the whole Shatterdome as her teachers, I’m sure she’ll do great things. She’s a bright girl.” His smile fell and his face was stern again. “But if you expose her to Kaiju Blue, I’ll station you so far down in the basement it’ll take you an hour to come up on the elevator. Understood?”_

_Newt nodded, and Mako giggled at his stricken expression._

Newt curls into a ball on the couch in his mental Hong Kong lab and cries.


	3. Chapter 3

Coming up out of the basement, Hermann is filled with equal parts worry for Newt and determination to help him. It’s going to be a long road. Jake hadn’t seen that Newt was still in there, but how could he? Who else knows Newt like Hermann does? Besides his family – Hermann should really talk to them. He’s still got their numbers, emergency contacts for Newt from the war days that he keeps transferring from phone to phone.

It’s not even seven in the morning yet, but Hermann knows he isn’t going to go back to sleep. He makes a stop to his room to change, shave, and use a little machine he keeps under his bed. Somebody wanted to throw it out, but Hermann thought it might come in handy. He compulsively saves things. Newt used to tease him about it – no. Don’t think about that right now.

Seeing Newt taken over like that had been torture. And it was even worse, somehow, when the real Newt had broken through. To know that he was still in there, cooped up in his own head…a dangerous place for Newt to be. Hermann wishes he could talk to him through the drift, but he doesn’t want to risk who else he might contact. The ghost drifting in the cell had been bad enough. It seemed like Newt had lost control because of it. Hermann used to prod out through their drift whenever Newt was close by, but now he must shut that pathway off. He can’t risk the Precursors getting into his head, too. It’s a miracle they aren’t already.

Hermann heads up to his lab in a daze, not really paying attention to his surroundings. Usually he can go into autopilot while his head is full of a math problem. For the first time in twenty years, he isn’t worried about saving the world. Just like Hermann Gottlieb tackles any other problem, all his mental energy is going into worry for one person.

Hermann doesn’t really register how crowded the K-Sci lab is until Dr. Iolana Kahale comes running up to him.

“What the hell is going on?” she demands. “Why is Shao Industries taking over? They couldn’t have saved the world without you, Hermann, it’s not fair.”

Hermann finally notices that the lab is filled with locals in Shao uniforms. They’re pulling up various holograms and talking amongst themselves, and some are even rearranging the lab area. He notices someone eyeing his personal lab and moves as quickly as he can to bar their way. Iolana is right at his heels.

“You’re not to enter this area,” he snaps. “Take it up with your boss if you’ve got a problem.”

“Yeah, and don’t you touch my Breach simulations!” Iolana adds. She’s easily the tallest person in the room; six feet with her bun. “If I find out anyone’s messed with the files you won’t get any help from me for the rest of the project.” She turns to Hermann. “What even is the project, Hermann?”

“Shao Industries is… _helping us_ to build ships to take the fight to the Anteverse,” Hermann growls. The Shao employee shakes their head and walks away to dismantle some other part of the K-Sci division.

“Excuse me?” Iolana asks. She spreads her arms. “They…I…what?”

“I know. It’s a stupidly dangerous idea. Come in here.”

He leads her into his lab where they won’t be overheard, but even then he whispers, “They want to use Newton’s connection with the Precursors to figure out their weaknesses. They’ve got him locked up in the basement. I _know_ some part of Newt is still in there, Iolana, but I don’t know if I can convince Jake and Ranger Lambert. I know Lambert won’t budge and I haven’t seen Jake since he was a young man.”

Iolana puts out a hand. He nods, and she puts it on his shoulder. She knows well enough to ask to touch him. He would have refused a week ago, but now he just needs someone, anyone on his side. He’s always valued Iolana as a colleague. She’s a genius-level physicist from Hawaii. It was her updates to his own Breach-detection software that allowed them to tell when the drones had re-opened the Breach. Hermann wouldn’t necessarily call her a friend, but Iolana might feel differently. Other people had such an easier time making them.

“Hermann, I’m sorry about Newt,” she says quietly. “I know you really cared about him.”

“Still do,” he murmurs. She tries to make eye contact, but he’s looking away, gnawing his lip and worrying the handle of his cane.

“Yes, sorry. From what I’ve read about Newt over the years and from what you told me, I know that he didn’t do this himself.” She puts another hand on his shoulder and he finally looks up at her. Her usually warm brown eyes are intense. “I believe he’s innocent, Hermann. And I don’t believe that we should be trying to re-open the Breach. Even if they’re going to ask me to help them with it.”

“Thank you, Dr. Kahale,” he says seriously. “I may be doing some less-than-legal things in the next few weeks and it’s good to have your support. If you’re going to stay, that is.”

She fakes shock. “Dr. Hermann Gottlieb, not following the rules? But hell yeah. I’ve felt hinky about working for the PPDC for the last few years anyway. If we need to take them down from the inside that’s fine. Whatever you need me to do, I’m there.”

The increasing militarization of the PPDC has been worrying Hermann as well. He rationalized to himself that it was for the greater good; when the Breach inevitably opened again they would be prepared. And then the new cadets, all children, were brought in to pilot _his_ Jaegers and he couldn’t excuse that. The anarchist part of him bled over from Newt was unable to be silenced. If the PPDC thinks that molding young minds into drift compatibility is easier than finding actual compatible partners, well, they should just look harder. Once Hermann had entertained the idea of piloting a Jaeger with Newt, since their drift is so strong, but that dream has died along with several others this week.

“Try and see who from the division you can get on our side,” he says. “Whoever’s left, that is. I need to stay on to be close to Newt.”

“Of course,” Iolana agrees. “I’m not going anywhere. I dread to think of what they’d get up to without me.”

“Exactly. They want me to focus on re-opening the Breach but I doubt I’ll be getting much work done. If you are going to stay I’ve got a favor to ask of you…”

By the time they re-enter the main lab, there are a knot of angry K-Scientists vying for Hermann’s attention. They come at him in a rush.

“Dr. Gottlieb, does this mean I’m fired?”

“So all this noise again? Are we decommissioning the Jaeger program or aren’t we? They should make up their minds!”

“Why am I being replaced? I’ve been here since the last Breach closed, Hermann, you know me.”

“You can’t just let these Shao Industry imbeciles come in here and do whatever they want, Dr. Gottlieb! It’s untenable!”

Hermann looks over all their heads as Iolana tries to placate them. Ranger Pentecost has just entered the lab. He spots Hermann right away and comes over with a somewhat sheepish expression.

“I’m sorry this is all happening so fast, Gottlieb,” Jake says. The scientists start to pepper him with questions but Hermann holds up a hand. “I authorized Shao Industries to come in here, so I’m answerable to any problems people have.”

“Thank you, Jake,” Hermann says. He puts both hands on his cane in his best “man in charge” stance. “Since this all has happened so fast, my employees and I have the same questions. We’d love to go over our new goals.”

 Jake rubs his chin – it looks like he hasn’t shaved in a few days – and gives Hermann a wry smile. “Goals, mission parameters. It’s all so official. Who put me in charge, eh?”

“I understand what you mean,” Hermann says. He leans in. “Are you going to be made marshal?” he asks under his breath.

Jake breaths out in a huff of air. “That’s the question. It’s too soon to say. Nate is campaigning for me. Not sure if I want it, honestly, but I’ve been the head of the Anteverse mission so far.”

“Oh, that reminds me.” Hermann digs around in his pocket and pulls out the clearance card to Newt’s cell. “Thank you for letting me see Newton.”

Jake accepts the card back. “Yeah. We need to talk about him, you and me.”

“Indeed we do,” Hermann says meaningfully. “Later.”

They turn back to the waiting throng. “Your team will be concentrating on opening the Breach and keeping it stable while our ships go through, attack the Precursors, and come back. Shao Industries are going to be focused on designing the ships themselves.”

There’s an uproar at this, from people who have made designing Jaegers their life’s work. Hermann would be among them, but he’s tired of war and tired of weapons. He doesn’t care that he won’t be able to design the ships, or any more Jaegers. His team is upset, and justifiably so. He’ll offer some words of wisdom later, after Jake has gone and they’re away from the Shao people. Hermann knows he hasn’t been the best boss over the years and now he’s about to work to undermine their new mission. He won’t blame the K-Scientists if they dislike him.

“Are the ships going to be based on Jaeger technology at all?” someone asks. “Will you need any of our knowledge?”

“We don’t know yet,” Jake says heavily. “But our budget just got a huge upgrade, so we’ll keep as many of you on as want to stay.”

Several people give pointed looks at Hermann and shake their heads. He’ll be signing quite a few resignation papers today. And it’s not even eight AM yet.

After answering a few more questions, Jake pulls out his phone and says, “I’m sorry, everyone, I have to get to another meeting. Gotta lot to do. Someone will send out more information about the mission once we have it.”

“Flying by the seat of our pants,” a scientist mutters loud enough to hear, and Hermann winces.

“Any other questions, you can ask Dr. Gottlieb here,” says Jake, and pats Hermann on the back. Hermann works very hard not to flinch away from the unwanted contact.

"Actually,” he says, “You can direct those questions to Dr. Kahale. I’ll be in my office…later today.”

 “What’s up, Gottlieb?” Jake asks as they weave their way out of the room. In this base, K-Science is on the top floor, which means a much better view. Hermann always wanted a lab with a view. He would fantasize about windows and sunlight while they were in the Hong Kong Shatterdome. Now he finds himself wishing he was back there.

“First of all, if we’re going to be working together more, I must insist you call me Dr. Gottlieb.”

Jake shrugs. “Fine, Doc. Is this when you wanted to talk about Dr. Geiszler? Because now really isn’t the time—”

“I need Liwen Shao’s phone number,” he says. “I assume you have it?”

Jake stops at the elevator. He jabs the “down” arrow a few times and turns to face Hermann. He sighs at his earnest expression.

“Yeah, I’ve got it, Doc, but why…”

“To tell the truth, Ranger Pentecost, I’m reluctant to give up control to everything I’ve worked for in the K-Science division. I owe it to my life’s work and my team to work something out with her. I’d like to talk to her, scientist to scientist.”

“Yeah. Fine.” Jake pulls out his phone and flicks the display to project a hologram version of Liwen Shao’s personal phone number. It floats above his device and Hermann adds it to his own phone. He has a growing list of people to call. “I honestly don’t care what you two come up with. Just get me through the Breach.”

The elevator dings, and he steps onto it. Just before the doors close, Hermann says,

“You sound so much like your father.”

Jake’s stricken expression is the last thing Hermann sees before the elevator descends.

Hermann can’t go back to his office yet. He feels bad for throwing Iolana to the wolves that are their colleagues, but only slightly. She’s connected with them more than he has. Ever since they started working with this team, she’s been the more public face. It’s been a while since he’s had a team underneath him and he’s a little out of practice. That’s how it was with Newt during the war, back when they had a team. He would get to know the interns, and rag on Hermann for not being nicer to them. They used to go out for drinks, too, and leave Hermann working late in the lab.

That was his own fault, wasn’t it? His own fault for not living a little when he had the chance. He needs somewhere to think. Just as there is on any base or Shatterdome, there need to be places to blow off steam. Hermann heads to one of his favorite places: the tropical greenhouse. The base therapist recommended it when she found he wasn’t getting off the base much.

“If you’re going to spend all your time here, you need to interact with some nature,” she told him. The humidity doesn’t exactly do wonders for his leg, but he must admit he loves the fresh smell of the air in there. It’s full of local plants he hasn’t bothered to learn the names of, and a few fish ponds and places to sit. He finds a bench in a private palm tree grove and pulls out his phone.

He hasn’t spoken to Jacob Geiszler in several years, so he barely recognizes the older man who answers his call.

“Hello?”

“<Hello, Mr. Geiszler,>” Hermann says. This will be easier in German. “<I know it’s a little strange to hear from your son’s ex but - >”

“<Is this Hermann? I’d recognize that Bavarian accent anywhere! Hermann, what’s been going on? Illia and I have been hearing some nasty things on the news. We can’t get hold of Newt – not that we’ve talked to him much recently, but we thought in an emergency like this he’d at least update us. Is he okay?>”

Hermann clutches his phone to his ear while his stomach bottoms out. They haven’t been told. Of course, who would think to notify Newton’s next-of-kin in the turmoil of the last few days?

“<H-he hasn’t talked to you recently?>”

“<No, we really only hear from him on birthdays and holidays. We know he was busy with work at Shao. That’s our Newt, hyperfocused on a project.>” Jacob’s laugh has a touch of hysteria. “<But we heard someone at Shao re-opened the Breach and of course, there was that Kaiju in Japan and all those deaths and…you have to wonder.>”

Hermann puts his head in his hands and starts crying silently. It’s all so much, too much for him to comprehend. The image of a death count and the image of Newt are incompatible in his mind.

“<It was him, Jacob,>” he cries. “<The Kaiju have hold of him, from when he drifted with one during the war. They’ve had him for – God, I don’t know how long. They made him do those things in Japan. He’s trapped in his own head. Alone.>”

On the other end, Jacob Geiszler starts swearing. He puts the phone down to yell for his brother Illia, and while the two of them grieve, Hermann just sits and listens. Newton sounds so much like his father on the phone, especially now that he’s older. Hermann should have called Newt’s family earlier. They might have helped him spot the warning signs. If not that, at least he would have still had a connection to the Geiszler family. Any way that he can be close to Newt.

“<Where is he now?>” another voice that must be Illia asks. “<Is he safe?>”

Hermann swallows. “<I don’t think so,>” he admits. “<But I will make him safe, I promise you. He’s on the base, I’m keeping an eye on him.>”

“<Our boy, trapped in his own body like that.>” Hermann can hardly understand Jacob through the man’s tears. “<I’m just glad his mother isn’t still alive to see; it would have killed her all over again. We should have noticed sooner. How did we not notice?>”

“<I don’t know,>” Hermann says. He wipes his eyes with one hand. “<I’ve been asking myself the same question. But I will find a way to make him right.>”

“<If anyone can, Hermann, it’s you,>” says Illia. “<He’s always loved you, you know.>”

“<I know,>” Hermann whispers.

“<Even after,>” Illia says, and they all know what “after” he means. “<He must have loved you even through those monsters in his brain. I wonder if that’s what’s keeping him going.>”

There is silence on the line for a few moments as the three of them listen to each other breathe. Jacob starts to cry again, and Illia’s voice breaks as he says,

“<Keep us updated, won’t you, Hermann?>”

“<Of course.>” And he will.

“Shalom Aleichem.”

Hermann hesitates for a second before replying, “Aleichem Shalom.” The call disconnects.

Hermann has always envied Newt for his family. It’s not a conventional one, but by god is it full of more love than his own. For some reason Hermann’s father is still alive, though if spitefulness were poison he should have died somewhere in the middle of the war. There was a brief, ecstatic time when Hermann thought he might be joining the Geiszler family. By God, had he wanted that.

Hermann takes a few minutes to collect himself before making his other call. The greenhouse is good for meditation. He sits with his feet flat on the floor, back straight, eyes closed, breathing in and out. His leg hurts but he tries to float above the pain. In and out, in and— _Newt had looked so tired, hadn’t he? Is whoever’s minding him making sure the Precursors are taking care of his body?_

Verdammt, but there’s enough of Newton Geiszler in him for him to be rubbish at meditation. His concentration isn’t what it used to be. And he’s anxious about calling Shao. She isn’t going to be happy with him calling her personal line.

To hell with it. He takes out his phone again and calls her.

“Zhè shì shéi?” Shao demands. “Shéi gěile nǐ wǒ de diànhuà hàomǎ?”

“It’s Dr. Gottlieb, Ms. Shao,” he says.

“Then I will repeat my question in English,” she says frostily. “Who gave you my number?”

“Jacobean Pentecost, but does that really matter? I need to speak with you in person, and soon.”

“Jacobean?” she laughs. “That’s his full name?”

“Did you really think someone named Stacker Pentecost would go with plain Jake? Now, when are you free next?”

She scoffs. “Uh, October.”

“Can you make it tomorrow night?”

“I have about four meetings.”

“Cancel them.”

“Oh, yes, of course, anything for you, Hermann Gottlieb.” Somehow her voice was made for sarcasm. Hermann knows she’s used to giving orders, but so is he. He’s not backing down on this. Time to bring out the big guns.

“I’ve been asking myself why I didn’t know there were several kaiju in Newt’s brain, but I suppose the person who saw him every day should really be asking themselves that,” he says.

Shao pauses. When she speaks next, her voice has defrosted slightly. She’s gone from icy to merely calculating. “So you talked to Dr. Geiszler?”

“I did. But I’ve got some questions that I don’t believe he’s going to give me straight answers to. I was hoping you could help me with those. And since we’re going to be colleagues for the foreseeable future, it’ll be nice to get to know one another, won’t it?”

“I suppose it will.” Her tone is cool. Well played, Gottlieb, it says. “I will send a car to pick you up at 6:30 tomorrow night. And now I have spent three more minutes than I had today talking to you. Goodbye, Dr. Gottlieb.”

The last time Hermann had a dinner date, it was a rebound with a sweet but sad-eyed man in Berlin. Hermann had chosen him because he had tattoos in his profile picture. It was one of the more embarrassing nights of Hermann’s life. He can only hope that his night with Liwen Shao goes somewhat better. He tells himself he’s not afraid of her.

And speaking of dates, he takes out the clearance card to Newt’s cell that he cloned. Now he can visit Newt whenever he wants, clearance be damned. They’ll have to change the locks to keep Hermann out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you may have already figured out, the chapters are going to alternate in points of view: odd numbers will be Hermann, even numbers will be Newt. (Also I used Google Translate for Liwen's line so sorry if it's wack.)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've only been writing this fic for a few days and I already missed writing Newt's regular voice. His voice is so much fun to write, y'all. In this chapter we get a look at what Newt does inside his own head.

Newt has had his doubts before, but he concludes that Hermann Gottlieb really is a genius. Using their arguing to give Newt control back was an unexpected move. For a few seconds it had felt so good. He had felt Hermann touching him, rubbing his leg and hand on his face. How many times had Newt longed for that, only for it to be the first thing he felt in months? He’s always been a bit of a basement dweller, but now he pictures a fresh breeze on his face or his feet submerged in a pool. Or Hermann’s arms wrapped around him, hot breath on his ear…

His memories start to shift and Newt lets them. He needs to escape from his newfound knowledge about Mako. What better way to do that than indulge in some nostalgia for a few hours?

_They staggered drunkenly back to the lab, Hermann even more unsteady on his feet than usual. Newt deposited him on the couch and collapsed into an office chair so hard it rolled back halfway across the room. Newt giggled and started scooting closer to the couch. Hermann rolled his eyes affectionately but was soon giggling too._

_"I don’t see you laugh much, dude,” Newt said when he reached the couch. He leaned back in the chair and put his feet up on the couch. “You have a really cute smile.”_

_Hermann’s laughter faded out into a contented sigh and he looked at Newt lazily. “When are we ever going to have a talk, Newton?”_

_"Talk?” Newt pulled out his phone and started scrolling through Twitter. Last time he drunk Tweeted (@KSciBabe) he got a bunch of likes. Maybe he could replicate the experience. “We talk all the time.”_

_"No, we do not.” Hermann stuck a finger into the air. “We argue. There’s a different-dicerffe-_ difference. _We need to talk about what we saw when we drifted with that Kaiju. Not what we saw in its mind. What we saw in each other.” That finger moved back and forth rapidly between the two of them in a very Newtonian gesture. “For so long I tried to deny my attraction to you, Newton. But after seeing the same attraction in your mind I am forced to confront it.” He took a deep breath. Newt threw his phone on the couch and leaned in._

_“Oh, fuck, are we doing this?”_

_Hermann held his breath and glared, and then let it out in a burst of words. “Newt, the last ten years have been some of the worst and most fulfilling of my life, and you were a major reason for that. I must admit that I have fallen in love with you.”_

_"Wow, dude!” Newt exclaimed. “That is such a coincidence! Because I’ve fallen in love with you!”_

_"Yes, Newton, I know,” Hermann said impatiently. “That’s why I’m saying it.”_

_"So you wouldn’t have said it unless we drifted?” Newt scooted his feet closer to Hermann’s lap._

_“I think the fact that I waited ten years to say it makes that fairly obvious.” He grabbed Newt’s legs and tugged them. “Just come here.”_

_Newt sprang out of his chair and straddled Hermann on the couch. He stared into the warm brown eyes framed by the gorgeously long lashes. Hermann grabbed his hips and helped him balance. Newt’s hands pressed into the ratty fabric of the couch on either side of Hermann’s head._

_“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked breathlessly. “We are pretty drunk.”_

_“I had already planned on telling you,” Hermann said. He put a hand to Newt’s face and traced his jawline. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it without some liquid courage. Rest assured, Newton, this is not a drunken confession that I will regret.”_

_Newt answered that enthusiastically with a kiss. Hermann’s an all right kisser – no, what is Newt thinking? The kiss is amazing because he’s kissing Hermann Gottlieb. His stuffy math professor crush since forever._

_At the contact, they ghost drifted, until they weren’t sure who was kissing who. It was probably because of Hermann’s influence in the drift that Newt pulled apart. “Hang on, we can’t go any further in here. The lab is full of enough gross bodily fluids without adding more. It’s unsanitary.”_

_Hermann tugged at his ear with his teeth and Newt let out a little scream. “Don’t care,” Hermann said. “Let’s start here and make our way to someone’s bedroom, hmm?” He said this low and dark right next to Newt’s ear, and Newt shivered._

_“Yeah, okay,” he agreed in a high-pitched voice._

_The next part was supposed to get extremely steamy, but Newt suddenly couldn’t concentrate with the thumping sound from the corner of the room. He looked across to see the Kaiju brain Alice tapping the wall of her case._

“Oh, sorry, do you not want to watch my first kiss with my ex, sweetie?” he asks brightly. Hermann’s gone and it’s just him and Alice in the lab. Just like the first time. He flips over onto his butt and crosses his arms. “If you don’t like it, maybe don’t watch.”

Plain old memories aren’t as vivid as that. If he concentrates enough, Newt can revisit any moment he wants to. It’s how the Precursors keep him docile. If he’s lost in pleasant memories, he’s not fighting them. They’re so good at tempting him. And in his own memories, they can watch him. They can’t access his subconscious, which is why Newt spends so much time there, even though it’s the most dangerous part of his brain. If he’s careful, and uses that Geiszler six-doctorate brain, he can find his way back out.

Newt sinks through the couch and down into his subconscious. He’s always thought it looks like a black hole pulling every discarded memory and Pixies lyric into its event horizon. Newt floats by a lot of random shit on the way down. The descent is slow at first, until he crosses a certain point and then there’s no returning without concentrated effort. He doesn’t want to get lost down this R.A.B.I.T. hole. The first time the Precursors took him completely over, he was lost in here for…a month? Several months? His usual method of telling the passage of time (pop culture) has been screwed up since the Precursors aren’t exactly TV fans.

Newt lands on the springy floor of his subconscious. True to form, it’s a junkyard crossed with a Kaiju graveyard. Piles of posters from his band’s Boston gigs spill out of Trespasser’s skull. The first time he came here, it reminded him of the Room of Requirement from Harry Potter. He wouldn’t be surprised to find a horcrux down here, honestly.

Newt sets off across the dark landscape. The lighting makes the Hermann memories easier to see. Newt can usually spot one from the blue tint and the aura of order they leave in the vicinity. Wherever Hermann’s been, lost sweatshirts are folded and broken dishes have been cleaned and repaired. Newt finds a pile that looks like it’s been recently tidied and follows the trail. When he hears voices speaking German he picks up the pace.

“<So tell me about this online boyfriend of yours, Hermann.>”

Newt skirts around a ribcage that looks like Leatherback’s and comes across a scene of domesticity: Hermann sitting at a table with a woman Newt has never met but nevertheless recognizes as Karla Gottlieb. Hermann’s sister. Newt takes a seat at the table in the middle of the junkyard and the scene slowly gains color. Walls fold open and cupboards slide into place. The three of them are sitting in a small kitchen. Sunlight streams through the window, and almost every surface has a plant on it.

Hermann sips his tea to hide his embarrassment. “<Oh, please, Karla, it’s nowhere near as intimate as that. I refuse to have a long-distance relationship, especially not with someone I’ve never met.>”

Karla’s eyes twinkle over the rim of her cup. “<It feels like you’ve met him, though, doesn’t it?>”

Hermann fiddles with an empty biscuit packet. “<We connected so quickly. You know how much easier it is for me to express myself in print. I don’t think he’d like the real me very much.>”

“Oh, you have no idea,” Newt says dreamily. He puts his elbows on the kitchen table and props up his chin. This Hermann looks to be in his late twenties, even ganglier than the current version. “You know what’s easier, Herm? Hiding in here while those sick fucks use my body like a Newton Geiszler puppet.” He puts out a hand and flaps it like a mouth. “Hi, I’m Dr. Capitalist and I wear suits and vests now!” He slaps the table. “You’d think that would be a sign, Hermann! Vests, on me? Really?”

“<…should try meeting him anyway,>” Karla is saying. Newt guesses that this is her kitchen; the house plants don’t really seem Hermann’s style. The last he heard, Karla still lived in Germany along with the rest of the Gottlieb clan. “<What’s the worst that can happen?>”

“<We never speak again and I lose contact with the dearest friend I’ve ever had,>” Hermann says instantly, like he’s already considered the possibility.

“Yep!” Newt agrees. “Well, not quite. And dearest friend? That’s sweet coming from you, Herm. By this time I was already calling you my ‘math penpal hotboy’. How did I know you were hot? You just sounded attractive. I’ve been lying to you all these years, Hermann. I’m sapiosexual. I’m actually just attracted to your brain.” He lets his chair scrape across the floor and stands up. “You know, it’s not really banter if you never respond, babes. I need someone to practice arguing with so I can be ready the next time I see 2035 you. Who knew arguing could save my life, huh?”

At the table, Karla and Hermann themselves are arguing. This memory must have been significant for Hermann to hold onto it for so long. Newt imagines that the Gottliebs don’t argue very much. Why else would Hermann have so many years of pent-up rage?

“<Father won’t understand!>” Hermann says loudly. “<He’s prejudiced about everything else, you think he’ll be tolerant about this?>”

“Oh!” Newt exclaims. “This is that conversation, huh?”

He comes to stand behind Hermann’s chair and leans on it. Karla’s short brown hair is pinned back and she keeps tucking it behind her ears agitatedly. “<I think he already suspects, Hermann.>”

“<Oh, so this will just confirm his worst fears, then,>” Hermann says sourly. “<He disapproves of me enough, I’m not telling him about my sexuality.>”

Newt grabs Hermann’s shoulders and starts kneading them. He can’t really interact with the memory, but it’s nice to pretend. “You should’ve let me massage you more often. But no, I couldn’t touch your hip. And you wouldn’t schedule deep-tissue massages either. Never able to make time for yourself. Self-care is very important.”

“<It doesn’t matter to me, Hermann.>” Karla smiles across the table. “<You’re still my older brother and I love you. I’ll love whoever you end up with. Unless they’re terrible and I completely disapprove.>”

Hermann laughs. “<You’d certainly approve of Newton. The two of us are exact opposites. He enjoys the louder things in life. Rock concerts and the like. He keeps recommending me disgusting mixed drinks recipes.>”

“You actually liked Red Bull vodka shots when I made them,” Newt mutters.

“<Despite all that, I do admit a sense of…attraction.>” The ghost of Hermann’s muscles tense beneath Newt’s hands. “<There are times I’ve thought of telling him.>”

“<Then why don’t you?>” Karla asks.

“I can’t blame you, man, I wrote and deleted about twenty confessions of love before we finally met,” Newt says. Hermann gets up, walks through Newt, and starts pacing the kitchen. Newt shudders. Nothing like being ghosted to pull you out of a fantasy.

“<It would ruin everything, Karla. I can only guess at his sexuality.>” Hermann tugs at hair that is uncharacteristically long. “<I have a wild hope but nothing substantial. This is silly, I’m wearing a hole in your floor again. Shall we move to the living room?>”

“Oh, no, don’t go,” Newt says, but Hermann and Karla leave the kitchen and the memory fades. Newt’s standing in his subconscious junkyard, alone. Pieces of debris fall out of the black hole in the sky and drift around him to settle in the various piles. Newt starts trudging across the landscape, looking for a way back up. Last time he was stuck in here he rigged up some pieces from a rocket ship and launched himself back through the hole, since he knows he’ll get sucked back in if he’s high enough off the ground. Where’s the tallest thing around…?

Newt clambers up a pile of clothing and furniture to get a better vantage point. There’s nothing but piles and piles of discarded junk, and at the “edges” of his brain things fade into mist. Newt sits on the couch from his aunt’s first house and thinks. He’s thinking with the brain he’s currently in, that’s a fun paradox.

The subconscious isn’t just forgotten things. It’s things that he knows without being aware that he knows them. They’re his desires that he isn’t aware of having – hence the Kaiju bones. What’s a big thing that Newt has never admitted to wanting? Fame, being proved right, Hermann? Those are too obvious. And the desire would have to involve Hermann, too. His presence has had enough of an impact down here.

Newt spots it and hops down from the couch. He sprints through the piles, leaping over broken desk chairs and sliding across the stages of shitty dive bars. It’s buried deep, but it’s in here. And he can just make out the edges of it. He climbs up onto an arm and runs across the metal surface until he reaches the body. Then he grabs the chassis with both hands and swings himself up, hand over hand, until he’s standing on the neon blue faceplate of Newt and Hermann’s dream Jaeger.

“Hey, buddy!” Newt crows. “Who better to get me off the ground than a huge punchy-punch robot? Hermann probably filled a notebook with cool names for you. I’m gonna call you…mm…Treble Pythagoras. Tacky and pretentious. Perfect!”

He stomps around until he finds the entrance panel, which he kicks in. The Conn-Pod he lowers himself into is sideways and in disrepair. Newt wraps the wires of the harness around himself and locks into the footholds. He strains to reach the switch that’ll activate the HUD. It grows to meet him, because this is his subconscious and it works for him, dammit. He flips it and the display comes to life. There are a lot of read-outs that Newt only half-understands. He glances towards the spot where Hermann should be, hoping to see a ghostly blue figure helping him pilot the controls. There’s no one there.

“Uh, step one,” he says. “Get the Treble upright. Tendo, I wish you were here, man.” He isn’t actually wired into the Jaeger so he’s just counting on the expectation that it will work anyway. With the Treble on its back, all he can see through the faceplate is the black hole in the sky. Newt grabs the wires and tries pulling himself up. The Treble twitches.

“Come— _ON_!” He falls backwards, nearly breaking his legs as the boots keep him clamped to the floor. “I’m not supposed to be down here that long! Hermann said he was coming back! I can’t get stuck down here again!” On the HUD, a warning flashes: _LEFT AND RIGHT BRAIN NOT CALIBRATED._ “Yeah, I fucking know! It’s kinda hard when my co-pilot isn’t here. It’s to do with the strength of your brain or something, right? If Raleigh Beckett can pilot solo then so can I. My brain’s stronger than his any day.”

He tries sitting the Treble up again, and this time it moves ponderously to a seated position. Newt relaxes against the wires. He can stand upright without wanting to dangle backwards now. He swipes the HUD screen a few times. “Well, something’s at 20%, that’s for sure. And these readings – they’re off the charts! All right, bad boy. Let’s get you moving.”

At those words, the Jaeger puts its massive hands on it knees and gets to its feet. Newt freezes with his fingertips outstretched towards the HUD. “Uh, I didn’t do that.” The Treble takes a few steps. Curiously, there’s no mental strain like Newt imagined there would be piloting a Jaeger alone. Is he not actually piloting the Treble Pythagoras?

These suspicions are confirmed when the Jaeger holds a hand up to its head. Newt slowly unclamps from the boots and steps out of the wires. He climbs out and the Treble meets him. It takes him gently and holds him up to its face.

“Are you…alive?” Newt asks in awe. “I was in your head. Or are you in my head? That’s weird.”

The Treble puts him on its shoulder and crunches across the junkyard. Junk and Kaiju bones alike splinter beneath its feet. Newt doesn’t care. He’s not coming down here again. He needs to stay more present. He wants to be aware when he sees Hermann, even if he’s not in control.

Treble Pythagoras stops just below the black hole and looks up at it. Newt puts a hand on its head. Although damaged, it really is the perfect combination of his and Hermann’s interests. It’s a skinny Jaeger, not built for fighting, and shiny black with neon blue running through it. Newt knows he didn’t design it himself. Somehow Hermann’s desires mingled with his enough to create this. If only they had actually created something like Treble Pythagoras together.

“I wish you could come with me, buddy,” Newt says. “’You stay, I go’, huh? _Iron Giant_ was never really my thing. Maybe it’s Hermann’s.” The Jaeger plucks him off its shoulder and winds back its arm to throw him. “Wow, you really are autonomous, aren’t you? Okay, just launch me into the sun.”

Treble Pythagoras takes his meaning and hurls him into the black hole.

Reality isn’t very pleasant. Newt is semi-aware of his body, and he’s sure the Precursors are only letting him feel that to make him miserable. He knows they haven’t been sleeping because he feels like he has raw sewage in his veins. That was his base state in college.

“Okay, so you’re feeding me but not sleeping, so I know you want to keep me alive. This is just to let me suffer, right? We’re stuck in here together, you might as well make it nice for yourselves.”

Newt isn’t allowed to fantasize. There’s just him and the Precursors behind his eyes in the cramped cell.

“Your memory must be shot,” they say out loud, mainly to let him know they still have control of his mouth. When they talk out loud they still say things like he would, which is just wild. Maybe they’ve been pretending to be him for so long that they can’t kick the habit. “We aren’t stuck in here with you. We want to be here. Or at least, we used to.”

“I mean, feel free to leave at any time! Jesus, don’t let me keep you.”

“Maybe we will,” they say agreeably. “Only after we leave you a broken, empty husk of a man. We were here voluntarily but didn’t enjoy the experience.”

“I only wish you’d said something, we could have ended it a lot sooner.” Newt is only bantering because it’s comforting. There’s no mistaking it for apathy. He’s terrified of the Precursors and always has been.

He changes the subject. Afraid or not, nothing they can do to him will remove his hyperactive attention span. “Why did you try to kill Hermann? Are you afraid of him?” For the first time in their conversation, his tone turns serious. “You should be. He’ll keep trying and trying to stop you, and he won’t give up. Hermann Gottlieb is a persistent motherfucker.”

“He cannot touch us!” they suddenly yell with Newt’s voice. It bounces off the walls of the cell. “He won’t try to hurt you and therefore us!”

“You are scared of him!” Newt is elated, and in spite of themselves the Precursors temporarily lose control of Newt’s mouth and he smiles a genuine smile. He thinks, “And you really pissed the two of us off.”

“We can imagine that ending the world would do that,” the Precursors hiss.

“Nah, I can take or leave the world. But you killed Mako Mori. And for that you bitches are gonna pay.”

Newt tries and fails to make a middle finger. His hand twitches, and at least that’s a start. He still hasn’t processed what happened to Mako, but he figures the best way he can honor her memory is kicking these tenants out of his mind that have overstayed their welcome. Seeing Hermann, and meeting Treble Pythagoras, has given him energy he hasn’t felt in years. There might actually be a chance.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These chapters just keep getting longer I'm sorry. Also I made a Precursor!Newt playlist! Check it out here: https://8tracks.com/femvimes/it-s-still-you

Hermann does a few laps around the greenhouse in an attempt to clear his head. He’s been a diligent PPDC employee for fifteen years now; they can allow him a few hours off. His phone buzzes several times and after the third text he grumbles and pulls it out.

IOLANA: Lambert is looking for you

IOLANA: Hey where are you?

IOLANA: I tried to cover for you but I think Lambert’s headed your way. You’re in the greenhouse right?

Hermann appreciates the heads-up, which he doesn’t deserve after leaving Iolana to deal with the ire of their co-workers. He responds,

HERMANN: Thank you. How did he know to come down here?

IOLANA: You always brood there

Good to know that he’s so predictable. Hermann checks his reflection in his phone to make sure all tears are wiped away. Just as he steps out from behind a potted lemon tree, he nearly runs into Ranger Nate Lambert.

“Ah, Ranger,” he greets him smoothly, as if welcoming him into his own private lemon grove.

“You weren’t in your lab,” Nate says shortly. Hermann bites back a smart retort and says instead,

“I’ve been running myself ragged the last few days and thought it would help to take a half-hour break or so. Also, I had to make some personal phone calls. What did you want to see me for?”

“Walk with me?” Nate asks, gesturing towards the door.

“Sure,” Hermann says guardedly, and they step out into the sunshine. There are lots of people around, mostly Shao techs unloading equipment, and Hermann understands Nate’s reasoning. They’re out in the open, but not close enough to anyone so that they’ll be overheard. Nate reminds him of Raleigh Beckett, but with less class. Hermann wonders if he should reach out to Ranger Beckett, offer his condolences about Mako. The last he’d heard they were platonic life partners.

He points his cane towards the Shao aircraft. “They’re moving in rather fast.”

“We can’t slow down,” Nate says. “We have to keep moving while we ride the high of victory. The PPDC wants us to get working on the Anteverse mission while the public is still in our favor.”

Staying in public favor is important. The PPDC has been a drain on the world’s resources while becoming a quasi-governing force at the same time. Public approval of the organization was at an all-time low prior to this week’s events, which is why Shao was so popular. Hermann knows people won’t be too happy with her joining forces with the dictatorship – not a dictatorship, _dammit, Newton side of the brain, can you not switch off for five minutes?_

“Ranger Lambert, I have to ask,” says Hermann as they strike out across the Jaeger landing platform. “How much of the Anteverse mission was yours and Ranger Pentecost’s idea, and how much of it was the PPDC Council’s?”

Nate looks away, squinting against the sun’s glare. “It was Jake’s, at first, but they’re taking it further than either of us had thought. We know it’s going to take a lot to kill the Precursors. Higher ups’re thinking not just ships but armies marching through the Anteverse.”

The idea shakes Hermann to his core. Innocent humans have suffered enough in the past twenty years. Fortunately, his voice does not shake as he says, “Do you think that plan is liable to get out of hand? It sounds like it has already.”

“I don’t know. We’re really banking on our advantage.”

“And what advantage is that?”

Nate looks at him sideways. “Dr. Geiszler, of course.”

Hermann grips the top of his cane. “That’s what you wanted to talk to me about, isn’t it?”

“Dr. Gottlieb—”

“I’m not going to help you worsen his mental state. I refuse. I’m trying to do the opposite, in fact. Newton deserves help, not punishment. What the Precursors used him to do was not his fault.”

They’ve stopped on the concourse and are now glaring at each other. Why does every pilot have to be taller than him? Just once, Hermann would like to stare one of them down.

“There are some people who would disagree with that,” Nate says.

“Look, when I talked to Dr. Geiszler earlier this morning, his real self broke through, just for a few moments. If I were allowed to continue _that_ line of thought I’m sure I could rehabilitate him in a few months.”

Nate shakes his head. “No. He’s too valuable of an asset.”

Hermann is in danger of growing incoherent with rage. “I don’t believe that’s your decision to make, Ranger! May I remind you that you don’t outrank me? In fact, I may outrank you! And Newton is not an asset. He is a human being, a civilian at that, who has undergone mental torture for the last ten years. If I need to take it up with the PPDC Council then I will.”

 "How can you be so sure you’ll cure him?” Nate is yelling now. “Just because you two had a, a prior relationship, doesn’t mean you can just magically love the Precursors out of his head—”

“Maybe I could if I were given the chance!” Hermann shouts back. “And mine and Dr. Geiszler’s past is none of your damn business.”

“Don’t act like you’re the only person to ever fall in love with your drift partner. You can’t save him, Gottlieb. Is he really worth more than the world to you?”

Hermann cuts himself off before bursting out _Yes, yes, a hundred times yes, he_ is _the world to me_. Instead he looks away and twists his mouth into a scowl. A few J-techs are staring across the landing pad at them. He turns on his heel and walks briskly away, cane clipping on the concrete. He knows what his refusal to answer that question means to Ranger Lambert. Can his loyalty really be in question? Not six days ago he saved the world (again), he’s devoted his life to the PPDC, he designed most of the Jaegers around the world. Can’t they just let him have this one thing? Hasn’t he earned Newt’s safety?

***

Hermann’s sitting at his desk late that night, purportedly working on the Breach research. There’s even a holographic model of the second Breach spinning above his workspace. In reality, he’s parsing through the recent 1,000-page research document on Drifting. This is Dr. Miller’s study, the famous one that discovered a bond is stronger if pilots start young. Included in the report is a lengthy section on R.A.B.I.T.S. Hermann believes that those brain impulses might offer him a clue as to how to free Newton. He’s tried to learn more about Drifting in hopes that it will explain his disturbing dreams. Now he knows those were probably the Precursors trying to get into his mind.

He comes across an interesting passage: _I theorize that Drifting is possible even through the Breach, which is why the Kaiju continued to follow orders even when they were in our world. Just as the Hong Kong LOCCENT was able to contact Gypsy Danger through the Throat in Operation Pitfall, the Precursors –_

Hermann’s vision abruptly goes dark, and his limbs become paralyzed. In a panic, he looks around to find himself in a vaguely familiar place, with several people milling around him. It’s hard to see through the trickle of blood pooling beneath his left eye.

“Come on,” he chokes out. “Is that the best you’ve got?”

It’s not his voice, he didn’t say that. A figure nearby grabs his hair and tilts his head back. He looks up into the impassive face of a man he doesn’t recognize. Whoever he is, he’s got a military-style buzzcut and the body of a weightlifter.

“Oh, I can do much better, believe me,” the man says. He lets go of Hermann’s hair and reaches for something behind him. In the split-second that he has, Hermann looks down and sees that his arms are restrained and covered in tattoos.

The man turns back to him with a baton in his hand and brings it down on Hermann’s leg. The ensuing pain pulls Hermann out of the drift, and he falls out of his office chair with a scream. His bad leg is in agony. But there’s no time to waste on himself. They’re torturing Newton.

With the aid of his desk, Hermann claws himself upright and grabs his cane. He takes one step and his legs buckle beneath him. He grabs his desk before falling and, gritting his teeth, makes his way towards the door. Get to Newton. Get to Newton.

Cadet Namani is standing frozen in the doorway, watching him pant against the wall. She runs to help. Normally he would refuse it, but these are not normal circumstances. He puts an arm around her shoulder and she grabs his waist.

“What’s going on?” she demands. “Are you okay?”

“Get to Newton,” he gasps. “I have to get downstairs to Newton.”

She presses her mouth into a line and nods. “You’re ghost drifting, right? I’ll get you down there, Dr. Gottlieb.”

“Th-thank you, Cadet.”

They’re halfway to the elevator when another blow hits, this time on his stomach. Hermann’s vision briefly goes black, and he collapses against Amara.

“Dr. Gottlieb!” she yells. She’s so small; too small to hold him up. “Hey, somebody help!” she calls down the hallway.

“No,” he groans, struggling towards the wall. She props him up against it and he curls in on himself. “Nobody is going to want to help me. I n-need to get down there, I—unh!” Pain blooms over his right temple like the worst migraine he’s ever had. “Mein gott, they’re going to beat him to death! Th-this is my fault. I wouldn’t talk to the Precursors for them, I-I—” He can’t draw in enough breaths. No matter what he does, he cannot fill his lungs.

“Hey, doc! Look at me!” Slumped as he is against the wall, they’re almost the same height. Amara’s expression is fierce. Hermann knows she had to watch out for herself for most of her young life. He can’t imagine the strength she must have. “Breathe with me, okay? In through the nose – out through the mouth. Nice and slow.”

He takes a few seconds that he doesn’t have to get his breathing under control. He groans and pushes himself off the wall.

“Thank you, Cadet, but I’m not much concerned with myself right now. Please, I need to get to the elevator.”

He still can’t walk right; the phantom limb he’s sharing feels like it’s broken. Amara half-walks, half-drags him to the elevator and presses the button with her foot. While they’re waiting, Hermann feels a blow to his good leg and slides to his knees. His forehead hits the floor, and the next thing he knows he’s falling. No, not falling. Amara got him on the elevator. They’re descending to the basement.

Hermann opens his eyes, and Amara crouches in front of him. “You passed out,” she says simply. “I dragged you by your clothes onto the elevator. We’re almost there.”

“I cannot thank you enough, Cadet,” he murmurs. He’s still in a massive amount of pain and is completely wired through the Drift. Oh, Newton. “You didn’t have to help me.”

“Uh, yeah, but I kinda did though,” she says with a roll of her yes. “Rockstar scientist Hermann Gottlieb needed some good old-fashioned rescuing? You literally designed all my favorite Jaegers! That’s why I was coming into your lab, actually—”

She’s cut off by the ding of the elevator arriving. The door opens and Amara helps him to his feet. He can barely stand at this point. She moves to help him out into the hallway and he holds up a hand. “No. You stay here. This could get very bad.”

She sighs a teenager sigh, her breath hitching. “Worse than it already is?”

He looks at her pointedly. “ _Yes_.”

“Fine, fine.” She steps back with her hands up. “I’ll keep the elevator here for ya.”

“Again, thank you, cadet. You’ve earned the answers to any Jaeger-related questions you have.”

She gives a double thumbs up, and he grimaces at her through the pain in his legs and abdomen. With one hand on his cane and the other pressed against the wall, he staggers down the hallway towards the doorway to the interrogation room. The closed door has a glass window through which he can see several people besides Newt. His stomach flip-flops, and he realizes he’s experiencing the scene from the drift through his own perspective now. Through the glass, the buzzcut man grabs the front of Newt’s shirt and pushes his forearm into Newt’s larynx. Hermann falls against the door, choking and gasping. The bruises on his neck flare with knife-edges of pain. He manages to slap the glass, and that combined with the sound of his body hitting the door gets the room’s attention. The pressure on his neck leaves, and he sucks in air.

There are footsteps behind the door, and then it slowly opens. Jake sticks his head out and his mouth falls open when he sees Hermann leaning against the door.

“Shit, man, are you okay?”

“No,” Hermann hisses through gritted teeth. “I am not _okay_. Let me in there at once! This is a violation of prisoner’s rights, not to mention a violation of my rights. Newton and I are currently drifting.”

“Yeah, fuck.”

Jake disappears for a second and then leaves the room followed by Nate Lambert.

“They’re drifting,” Jake tells Nate.

“Let’s get him inside,” Nate says. He purses his lips at Hermann but doesn’t say anything more.

They put their hands behind his knees and lift him off the ground. Jake kicks the door open and they carry him into the room. Nate hooks his foot under a chair and drags it over with an awful screeching noise. Hermann hardly notices when they sit him into it. He was staring at Newt as soon as he entered the room. Newt’s smug, handsome face is bloody and swollen. Despite this he’s smiling. The buzzcut man points the baton at Hermann.

“Who the hell’s this?”

“The man currently drifting with your torture victim!” Hermann spits. “Or should I call it something nicer? _Enhanced interrogation_ , maybe?”

“I knew you cared,” Newt says through split lips. “I knew you’d come. Thanks, Herm. Really saved my ass. Or should I saw, Newt’s ass? I know you like his ass, Hermann.”

Hermann stares at him, stricken. “It was you! You made me feel that through our drift, not Newton!”

The Precursors laugh. “You big gay idiot, you know he can’t actually feel any pain, right? He can’t feel anything.”

Hermann pants, clutching his chest. “No…I did not know that.” The pain and sensation of sharing a body starts to fade away, leaving nothing but a fierce headache and exhaustion.

Buzzcut nods at the door and they turn to see Amara standing there. She’s staring at Newt with a look of horror. Hermann realizes that she’s not afraid of him – she’s afraid for him.

“Amara,” Jake sighs, and Nate rubs his forehead.

“Cadet Namani, I thought I told you to wait in the elevator?” Hermann asks quietly. There’s no keeping her out of this now. She finally looks at him. He understands that she’s grasped what’s going on. She’s not dumb.

“I-I heard shouting,” she stammers.

Buzzcut moves his arms, and even though it’s just to stretch, Hermann flinches and Amara takes a step back. Nate snaps his fingers at Buzzcut.

“You can leave, Ward. I don’t think we’ll be needing you again. I’ll call someone to pick you up in the morning.”

Ward just shrugs, picks up a bag of… _tools_ that Hermann tries not to look at, and leaves the room. Amara gives him a wide berth as he goes out the door and down the hall. The four of them wait in silence until they hear the elevator ding.

“Okay then,” Nate says heavily. “I want all of us out of this room right now.”

“What about Newton—” Hermann immediately asks.

“He’s got handlers,” Nate says shortly. “They’ll take him back to his cell.”

Hermann glances at Newt, who is watching them with a sardonic look. There is nothing familiar behind his eyes.

“Out,” Nate insists. Jake puts a hand on Amara’s shoulder and leads her gently out. Hermann refuses Nate’s hand and gets up by himself. His leg aches – nothing new there. They gather in the hallway and Nate locks the door.

“I’m sorry, Doc,” Jake says. “The PPDC council sent that guy. Interrogation expert.”

Hermann scoffs.

“I know, I know,” Jake says as he holds up his hands. “That’s why I insisted Nate and I were there. To stop things from getting out of hand.”

“And that wasn’t?” Hermann demands, his voice raising several octaves over the course of the sentence. He wants to fight, except tendrils of exhaustion are creeping around the corners of his brain. “I felt every single one of those hits and they were meant merely to hurt, not to extract information.”

Jake looks to Nate for a long moment and then bursts out, “This is bullshit, Nate, and you know it. There are ways we can talk to the Precursors without hurting Geiszler as well.”

“You heard what he said, though,” Amara speaks up. “It didn’t hurt Dr. Geiszler at all. It just hurt Dr. Gottlieb.”

Nate and Hermann lock eyes. Hermann will never ask, and Nate will never tell, but Hermann wonders who that torture was meant to persuade: him, or the Precursors? Nobody could have predicted the Precursors drifting with Hermann. What they could predict was Hermann doing anything to protect Newt.

“I’ll talk to the Precursors for you,” Hermann says abruptly. “That’s why you sent that ‘interrogation expert’ away, isn’t it?” He puts air quotes around the title, which is something he never would have done before drifting with Newt. “You know you’ll have my cooperation now.”

Jake turns away and punches the wall, lightly. “I hate this!” he exclaims. “It shouldn’t have to be this way.”

“But it is,” Nate says steadily.

“Yes,” Hermann says. “It is, isn’t it? And who knows – maybe Newton will have the answers you seek from the Precursors. Because I doubt they’re going to tell me anything. But I’ll try, for you, Ranger Lambert.”

Nate tightens his jaw and turns to Amara. “And don’t think I’m letting you off the hook! You may be new but you know what the curfew is, Cadet Namani.”

“The cadet was helping me in a medical emergency,” Hermann says. “I can escort her back to her room.”

She gives him a grateful look and they leave Nate and Jake in the hallway. The two of them stand next to each other in silence as the elevator starts going up. Then Amara turns to him, tugging at her hair.

“Je-sus,” she says, drawing the word out. “That guy really was going to town on him! Do you think Nate was doing that to you on purpose?”

 _Yes,_ Hermann thinks. “No,” he says. “Of course not. It was just an unfortunate side-effect.”

“You really love him, don’t you?” Amara asks. He finally meets her gaze in surprise.

“Who, Nathan Lambert?”

She laughs. “No, silly. Dr. Geiszler. You’re drift compatible, obviously, and even with the Precursors in his head you want to help him.”

“I especially want to help him because of the Precursors in his head,” Hermann says. He’s uncomfortable discussing his love life around this young woman he barely knows.

“So that’s a yes?”

“When I said I would answer any question you had, I meant _jaeger-related_ questions, cadet,” he says. That was nearly a joke. Newt would be proud of him. Amara shrugs.

“I only ask because I’m gay too.”

“Oh. Er…good?”

The elevator reaches their floor and they step out into the sleeping quarters area of the base. Everyone is asleep, or should be, so they lower their voices to whispers. Hermann tries to tap his cane as lightly as possible. He doesn’t make a habit of staying up this late, unless he’s doing work in the lab.

“It’s okay, I’m not about to ask you dating advice. I think Vik and I know what we’re doing,” Amara says, and Hermann blushes. In her enthusiasm to meet him, the cadet is babbling. “You really will talk to me about jaegers, though? I wanna know everything. You’re one of my heroes from the war. I actually downloaded some of your plans for the Mark I’s to design Scrapper.”

“Yes, I was rather impressed by that jaeger of yours—hang on. Downloaded my plans? Did you hack the PPDC database, cadet?”

She stops outside a door, and he realizes it’s the cadet’s shared dormitory. “Yep. See you later!” She waggles her fingers at him and goes inside. Shaking his head, Hermann continues down the long hallway to his own room.

It’s nearly one AM, and Hermann wants so badly to sleep, even if it means having nightmares. The day started with a worrying meeting and ended with torture, and it’s still not over. On the way back to his room the email alert on his phone dings. The “From” line is blank. He frowns and opens it. It takes some time for the message to load, and when it does it’s a garbled block of numbers. He’s about to dismiss it as spam when he notices a string of binary in the middle of the paragraph: _01010011 01101000 01101001 01100010 01100001 01110010 01101001_. He mentally translates this to the word _Shibari._ Whoever sent him the message wants him to use Shibari decryption software to read it. During the war, Shibari was the PPDC’s way to keep files classified. As a military-grade software, it’s probably both highly illegal and expensive to own a copy. He’ll ask Amara how to get ahold of it tomorrow.

He doesn’t remember anything about his dreams that night other than the sensation of not being alone.


	6. Chapter 6

Newt can only feel an echo of the pain in his body and it still hurts. Do the Precursors think that they can upset him this way? Not to be emo or anything, but he’s happy to feel anything at all, even if it’s pain. That whole interrogation was fucked up, though. And what does it mean that the Precursors can drift with Hermann enough to hurt him? Can they get to him? Newt’s never been sure of their plans, and that hasn’t changed. All he knows is that they’re more desperate than ever to hold onto him. It’s getting easier to control parts of his body for a short amount of time now that he isn’t drifting with Alice every day. (He can feel her close by on the base, which isn’t helping.) Every now and then he tries clenching his butt muscles or smiling a genuine smile. It’s exhausting.

His guards lead him out of his cell and strap him into his chair the next…morning? What even is time anymore? – and he thinks _oh please, not again, leave Hermann and me alone_. When who should enter the room but Dr. Hermann Gottlieb. He’s carrying a paper and pencil and looking very determined. Newt tries and fails to smile as he sits down opposite. The Precursors are nervous. Hermann’s always been the wild card, which is why they made Newt shut off contact.

“So you’re gonna be asking the questions now, huh?” the Precursors ask. Hermann gives a worried but triumphant smile.

“Yes, Newt, don’t worry, I’ll be interrogating you from hereon out. It’ll be just you and me. Unfortunately, I have to report back what you say. I’ve got a list of questions here…” Hermann adjusts his glasses and flips a few pages over.

_You’re so cute with those glasses on._ He gets to see Hermann, and the Precursors’ hold is weakening? This is the best Newt’s going to get right now. He hasn’t felt this good in a long time.

“Ah, before we begin, I brought some music to play,” Hermann says, pulling his phone out of his breast pocket.

“What you got for us?” the Precursors ask. “Bad Religion? Rise Against? More of his awful Earth music?”

_Okay, rude_ , Newt thinks. He would love to hear Bad Religion or Sex Pistols right now, thank you very much. He hasn’t been able to listen to music on purpose in several years. Since before he was completely taken over at least. Kaiju don’t like screaming punk rock very much.

Hermann just smiles over the top of his glasses as the first few notes of Joe Hisaishi’s soundtrack to _Spirited Away_ begin to play. _Oh man, Hermann_ … The Studio Ghibli soundtracks always remind him of forgiveness, and that’s exactly what he needs right now. Fuck, he misses movies.

“You were always trying to get me to watch the films, and when I saw them in your memories they intrigued me,” Hermann says as the piano drives Chihiro through the beginning of the movie. “They were very enjoyable. Reminded me of our brief time in Japan. I especially enjoyed _Whisper of the Heart_.”

_Okay, that’s not even a Miyazaki movie, Hermann, what are you doing? What was your favorite_ actual _Ghibli film? Are you doing this purposefully to start an argument?_ He wonders if Hermann knows that _My Neighbor Totoro_ was Mako’s favorite film, and then makes himself sad again.

_“I know you prefer the original, obviously, Mako, but what do you think of the English dubbed version?” Newt asked her when she was about fourteen._

_“I enjoyed it. All the Miyazaki dubs helped me improve my English.”_

_“What didya think of_ Porco Rosso _?” Newt asked eagerly._

_“I don’t think I’ve seen that one,” she said with a frown._

_“You haven’t—oh my god, I know what we’re watching tonight.”_

“I think we’ll start now,” Hermann says, pulling him out of the memory. “Precursors, or Newt, whoever wants to answer, what are the current military capabilities of the Anteverse?”

“We’re pretty powerful, Hermann, I don’t think I need to tell you that. We’ve taken over hundreds of worlds. You did blow up a few of us ten years ago when you cancelled the first invasion.”

“Thank you,” Hermann said, making a note.

“For what?” the Precursors demand.

“Using a collective ‘we’ pronoun,” Hermann says without looking up. Newt clenches his fist in triumph. _Take that, boys! Hermann sees right through your bullshit!_ “I called your family, by the way.” Hermann looks up to gauge Newt’s reaction. The Precursors betray nothing, where Newt would shout questions if he could. _You talked to my dad? Did Uncle Illia’s cancer relapse? Are they mad at me?_

“They’re very worried about you. I told them I’d keep them updated. Now, next question,” Hermann says briskly. “What’s the radiation like in the Anteverse?”

“Toxic to humans,” the Precursors reply. “Absolutely, completely irradiated. Only Kaiju and Precursors can stand it. You’ll all die from radiation poisoning.” Newt suspects that this is exaggerated slightly, but he really can’t be sure. What happened to Raleigh Beckett? Mako turned out fine.

“All right.” Hermann writes something down. “About how many Kaiju do you have fabricated? How long does it take you to make them?”

“There are Kaiju by the thousands, obviously. Lots of worlds to conquer!

“Mm-hmm.” As he makes a note, Hermann says in German, “<Newt, the Precursors are bad at languages, right?>”

“Wh-what?” the Precursors ask. They only stammer when they’re starting to lose control, and Newt hopes Hermann picks up on it. _Hermann Gottlieb, you handsome genius._ Hermann’s right – the Precursors were constantly embarrassing him with their bad Mandarin, which Newt picked up just fine after the first two years in China. He’ll admit his German is a little rusty. He doubts it’s worse than the Precursors’, though.

He distantly feels sweat start to trickle on his forehead with the Precursors’ effort of keeping him quiet. _Fucking let me talk in my mother tongue, you gigantic assholes, you know you’re losing already._

“<We—are—older than your—entire species,>” the Precursors splutter in piss-poor German. Newt is physically ashamed. He’s never been so proud to be German and they’re just ruining it. “<Human languages—are beneath us.>”

“<You speak English just fine,>” Hermann taunts. “Next question: are you planning on coming back? Again, I did not write these. This is a silly question. I can’t imagine how you’d do that.”

“We—of course I could do it!” The Precursors revert to English as they become flustered. Newt is delighted. _Welcome to being rendered incoherent around Dr. Hermann Gottlieb._ “We don’t need him! We don’t even need your tiny planet! **We will conquer it just to prove you wrong!** ”

“Interesting,” Hermann says calmly. “<Come on, Newton, do you need more time?>”

It would sure help if he’d gotten more than two hours of sleep in the last week. He snatches a few minutes here and there when the Precursors accidentally nod off. As they got closer to executing their plan over the last month, they slept less and less. Which…relatable. Now they’re doing it just to spite him.

Newt is trying so hard to concentrate that he doesn’t register the rumbling at the back of his mind at first. He thinks it’s the Precursors trying to distract him. Then he senses that they’re uneasy about the rumbling, and that’s when he starts to pay attention. There’s a thought he’s trying to think – if it can just break through -

Like a sea monster bursting up from the depths, Treble Pythagoras punches through the floor of Newt’s conscious mind. He turns his gaze inwards and is suddenly standing in Treble’s conn-pod. Looking through the display screen is like looking out from behind his eyes. Trippy. So the Treble is out of his subconscious and into his regular consciousness now? It seems to be a little less damaged than before. Newt looks to his right. The co-pilot spot is empty. He knows it should be Hermann. Is he piloting _himself_? Is _he_ Treble Pythagoras? This is getting confusing.

A blue drift-ghost flickers in and out of the second pilot harness. Newt watches it as it turns from humanoid to something more, something _other_ and then he’s co-piloting with a Precursor. Newt screams. He doesn’t actually get to see the manifestation of the Precursors very often. He forgot how awful they are to look at. They’re just unsettling to the human eye. It turns to him and then it turns _into_ him, wearing one of those awful suits they chose for him to wear. It grins at him and reaches for the HUD.

“No!” Newt yells within the conn-pod. “Not this time you don’t! We are not piloting my body together, I do not nor have I ever consented to this!” He tries to wrest control away and is suddenly engulfed in a memory from a few months after the first Breach was closed.

_He first realized something was wrong when he started losing hours or days at a time. He thought it was just exhaustion from working himself too hard. Even with the Breach closed, the PPDC wanted him to keep studying Kaiju. He’d had depression before and this wasn’t it. He had Hermann, he still had a purpose – so what was wrong with him? It was when he saw a therapist and couldn’t physically tell her what was happening that he really started to worry._

_“Have you been doing all right lately, schatzi?” Hermann asked him one night. “You know you can take breaks. Marshal Hansen approved my leave for the Boston trip. He said you hadn’t asked for it yet.”_

_“I don’t know if I’ll be able to go to Boston, babe,” Newt heard himself saying. “I’ve got too much to do here.”_

_Hermann glared at him. “What are you talking about? We already bought the plane tickets. Your family is ready for us to visit. We’ve earned this. Even if the Kaiju are coming back eventually, they won’t while we’re gone for a few days.”_

Hermann, it’s not me, I want to leave just as much as you do _, he tried to say. Instead he, or something inside of him, said, “You don’t know that. It could be any day now. I’ll talk to the marshal. You should go visit your own family or something.”_

_“I don’t want to see my family!” Hermann bursts out. “You know that, Newton. What’s gotten into you?”_

_He didn’t know. Until he did. What had gotten into him? What awful, scuttling bugs had crawled up into his brain? Only the ones he had let in._

He’d chased a R.A.B.I.T. without realizing it. The Precursors probably threw it at him to distract him. Fortunately only a few real-world seconds have passed. Newt watches Hermann reach for his phone and change the song.

“There’s this band I thought you might like, they’re called Train?”

From inside Treble Pythagoras, Newt yanks control from the Precursors. “Yeah, that’s it.”

Out loud he says, “<Hermann, I’m getting tortured enough in here without you playing that trash you call a band.>”

Newt’s so unused to smiling Hermann that the man’s broad grin nearly blinds him. Hermann turns the music off.

“<I assure you, I haven’t actually been listening to them.>”

“<Thank god. You better hurry and ask me some of those questions. I don’t know if I’ll be able to answer any of them.>” He nods to the paper in Hermann’s hands, about the only movement he can make in this bondage chair.

“Ah—yes.” Hermann scrabbles for a new page. “<Is there a way we can make a Breach non-Kaiju can go through?>”

“<If it were me I’d use the Hunter>\--god, what’s the word in German--<drones, ha! that I modified that are part-Kaiju.>” He hasn’t spoken German in so long he’s actively forgetting parts of it. (Except for “Jaeger”, of course.) That or the Precursors have caused lasting damage in the language part of his brain. Please let it just be from disuse.

“<Brilliant!>” Hermann exclaims. “<If I approved of that plan, that is. They want to send an entire fleet through, Newt.>”

“Jesus. <Hey, are we doing this in German because it’s being recorded, too?>”

Hermann subtly sticks a thumb towards the corner of the room behind him, and Newt glances up to see a blinking light he didn’t notice before. “<They’re watching us? Gosh, what must that be like?>”

“<Yes, well…>”

“<Why do enemies have to be everywhere?>”

“<The PPDC aren’t our enemy.>” Hermann pauses. “<Though they are rapidly becoming so, I fear.>”

“<Hate to rush you, dude, but have you got another question?>”

The Precursor in the conn-pod of Treble Pythagoras has dropped its Newt disguise and is trying to get back control while looking like itself. It hisses and clicks at him. Even though Newt’s disgusted by its appearance, he takes comfort in the fact that they’re having to concentrate just as much as he is. They’re neck in neck for control, which is a nice change from when Newt was only in control 5-10% of the time. Newt can really feel the sweat now. Something else is dripping off him.

“Oh.”

Hermann looks up from his notes to see that Newt’s nose has started to bleed. His eyes widen in concern.

“<What does that mean, Newt?>”

“<We’re—uff—wrestling for control. I’m a Hunter right now. Isn’t that weird?>”

The concerned look stays on Hermann’s face. “<I’m sorry, Newt, I don’t understand. Is it all right if I ask the next question?>”

“<Please.>” The more the better while Newt is in control. He’s gonna have to sleep the rest of the day after this.

“<How are the Precursors controlling you without a Breach?>”

That is absolutely, unequivocally, a forbidden question. Newt’s Precursor co-pilot takes back control and pastes a manic, brittle smile on Newt’s face.

“That’s the million-dollar-question, isn’t it, Hermann? No!”

Newt jerks, and Hermann drops his notes and rushes forward. He puts his hands on the arms of the chair. “<Fight them, Newton! Let me know how I can help you!>”

Newt breathes in great, shuddering gasps. “<What—would you—have called—our Hunter?>”

Hermann bites his lip. “<I-I don’t know, I never really…>”

“Hermann! Please!” Newt shrieks.

“It would have to have incorporated both of our personalities in the name,” Hermann says quickly. “Fractal Skeleton, maybe?”

Newt closes his eyes and smiles. “Nah. Mine’s better.”

“Well, what is it, then?” Hermann says waspishly.

“Treble Pythagoras.”

“That works, I suppose.”

Newt’s eyes snap open. “You _suppose_? It’s awesome, dude!”

Hermann stares at him. “Now I can’t tell which one of you is talking. This is going to be a problem.”

“I’m hurt, Hermann,” the Precursors say. Hermann narrows his eyes.

“<In German, if you please, Newt.>”

The Precursors snarl at him. “<I—I—you--> **You think you can fix him?** ”

Hermann takes a step back. Newt sees him trying not to let his fear show every time the Precursors use their hivemind voice. _No, no, stay close to me, please_. The Newt part of his brain is slipping out of consciousness. He put up a good fight today, and he’ll do it again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next until the Precursors are gone. He and Hermann make the best team.

“You’re not getting enough sleep, are you?” Hermann observes. “I don’t know if you know this, but human’s brains generally work better when they get eight to ten hours of sleep a night.” Newt can’t tell if he’s talking to him or the Precursors. Maybe both? Hermann starts towards the door. “I’ll ask the guards to give you a tranquilizer. Hopefully it works. And nobody’s let you change your clothes, either. I’ll see to it. You’ll be more comfortable. I think I’ve got an old band t-shirt around somewhere.”

_Okay, so unless you’ve changed drastically, that’s one of my old shirts. Did you keep it around, Hermann, you hopeless romantic?_ Not as if he’d kept a sweater of Hermann’s without washing it for months after they broke up. Nope, he wouldn’t do that.

“It’ll help your Newt Geiszler disguise,” Hermann says sarcastically. “Wearing suits voluntarily? What were you thinking?”

_That’s what I’ve been trying to say, Herm!_

Hermann’s face softens just before he reaches the door. “<I’ll be back tomorrow. Good-bye, Newt.>”

After he shuts the door, much too late, Newt mutters, “<Good-bye.>”

While the Precursors shout frantically at each other, Newt retreats to his mental apartment. He’s staggered by Hermann’s determination. Who would have seen them fighting for all those years and thought that Hermann would ever show him more affection and devotion than he ever deserved? Would Hermann have done this for him ten years ago? Fifteen? Before they drifted? Before they dated? After they drifted? No matter how many times the Precursors try to convince him otherwise, Newt knows that the answer to all those questions is _yes, yes, of course_ because he’s Newton Geiszler and he’s Hermann Gottlieb and that’s just the way it is. Lab partners, drift partners, life partners – neither aliens nor arguments can keep them apart for long.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the longest chapter yet, but there was a looooot of plot to get through. I hope you enjoy!

Hermann sits down at his desk and realizes he doesn’t have a clue how to write up his session with Newt. How can he convey in words the way that emotions flickered across Newt’s face like light on a screen? How can he explain that he didn’t know when the Precursors were talking, except when he did? Does he describe Newt’s black eyes and broken nose in his report?

Hermann gets through half of a very clinical paragraph when Iolana knocks on his door. She opens it without permission and leans against the doorway.

“Looks like we’re gonna have to hire some new people,” she remarks. “We’re down to half of what we were a week ago.”

“I won’t hire anyone until we’re forced to,” Hermann says. “I trust all the people who are staying. I can’t say the same of anyone new who comes in.”

Iolana comes in and closes the door behind her. “You’re really going all the way with this, aren’t you?” She leans over his desk and whispers, “Are we talking sabotage, Hermann?”

He sighs. “I don’t know yet. I don’t know if our team will be prepared for that. My priority right now is making Newton safe.”

“Oh yeah, how did that go?” Iolana picks up the kaiju toy on his desk and fiddles with the articulated tail. Hermann is about to tell her that it was Newt’s and then resigns himself to the fact that she probably already knew that. He still has so much ephemera left over from the time they spent together, even ten years later.

“I believe it went well. He broke through a few times, especially when I spoke to him in German. But he’s in so much pain.” Hermann decides not to tell Iolana about the drifting the night before, not yet. He’s been probing their connection tentatively but it’s closed off to him.

Iolana rubs her eyes, and for the first time Hermann sees how tired she really is. A few individual strands of silver run through her bun, and wrinkles have begun to form at the corners of her eyes. He has to remind himself that it was not just his world that came crashing around him when the Precursors revealed themselves. Everyone is stressed out and traumatized.

“They put it off until his family could make it, so Marshal Quan’s memorial is finally happening tonight,” Iolana says. Hermann swears,

“Verdammt, I forgot. I have a date.”

Iolana freezes. “You have a what?”

“With Liwen Shao,” Hermann says, shifting uncomfortably. Iolana drops the kaiju toy.

“Ex _cuse_ me?”

“Not a romantic date,” he says quickly, realizing his mistake. “Just a dinner together.”

Iolana relaxes and fake-collapses onto the edge of his desk.

“Thank goodness. You’re way too old for her.”

“Age isn’t the only incompatible thing about us,” Hermann murmurs. “I can’t cancel on her, it was hard enough to get this dinner.”

“No, you should definitely go. I’d drop everything to have a date with Liwen Shao.” Iolana pauses. “Wait, am I too old for her too? Fuck, the years are going by quickly.”

“I have no clue as to her…preferences. All I know is she’ll be in the lab quite frequently now.” He’s at least more relaxed talking about this with Iolana than Cadet Namani. China still isn’t the most tolerant country, but this is an international base and tends to run a little less conservative. Only a little. The PPDC is technically military now, and conservative politics have been the name of the game ever since Trespasser made landfall.

“I can bask in her presence at least,” Iolana says. “I’ll cover for you if anyone asks at the memorial.”

“Yes, and give my regards to the marshal’s family.” Marshal Quan was nowhere near as charismatic as Marshal Pentecost – Hermann doubts that is a distinction few on the planet have – but he was a good leader who valued the K-sci division. Hermann will miss him and the certainty he brought.

“Will do.” Iolana gives him a casual two-fingered salute. “I should get back to work on my _breach research_.” She says it pointedly and winks.

“Very subtle, Iolana,” he says drily. She just laughs and leaves his lab.

Only a few seconds later, Hermann gets a text message.

UNKNOWN: Are you free today?

HERMANN: Who is this?

UNKNOWN: Amara Namani

HERMANN: How did you get my number?

UNKNOWN: Guess. JK I didn’t hack your phone. It’s on the employee roster

HERMANN: Don’t give away all your secrets. I have a favor to ask when I see you

UNKNOWN: Cadets have free time in like half an hour if you wanna come down to our dorm

It’ll take him nearly that long to get down there. He looks at his report once more, closes down his workstation, and heads to the dormitory floor.

Hermann doesn’t interact with the cadets much. He gets introduced on the tour new recruits take, and every now and then Ranger Lambert asks him to give a talk about Jaeger technology. The cadets aren’t usually that interested. If they were into coding, they’d be on Hermann’s team and not rangers in training.

It’s with all this in mind that he goes down to the cadet’s dorm. He’s never been in there before – they have so little space to themselves that he wouldn’t want to trespass. They sure don’t experience the same program that he did. The emphasis now is on Versatile Drifting, rather than strengthening your connection with one partner. Hermann knows he’s only ever been drift compatible with one person. He can’t imagine forcing himself to drift with someone else.

Even if he didn’t know which door was theirs, Hermann can hear the cadets as he comes down the hall. He knocks and a hush falls. Thankfully, Amara is the one who opens the door.

“Hi!” She greets him enthusiastically. “Come on in. It’s kinda small, but…”

That’s an understatement. Hermann is appalled at how little space the cadets have. Their dorm, which is meant for eight, is only three times the size of his room for one.

Amara leads him in to an empty bunk and sits him down. The other cadets resume what they’re doing, albeit while giving him and Amara a few strange glances. A girl with short blonde hair that Hermann distantly knows as Cadet Malikova looks down at him from the top bunk.

“So this is your scientist?” she asks Amara.

“Vik, this is Dr. Gottlieb,” Amara introduces him. “He’s like, my idol.”

Vik rolls her eyes. “You have too many idols,” she says in a thick Russian accent.

It wasn’t until she spoke that it clicks for Hermann: “You’re the Kaidanovskys’ niece, aren’t you?” He misses Sasha and Alexei. He misses everyone.

That wasn’t the right thing to say. Vik swings her feet over the side of the bunk and hops down. “Amara, tell this man that if he wants to reminisce about my aunt and uncle, he can do so alone.”

“Aw, Vik, come on,” says Amara as Vik starts to walk off. “Stay and tell him yourself.”

Vik lingers at Amara’s bed and runs her fingers through her girlfriend’s hair. “You need to stop spending so much time hero-worshipping, short stuff. People are just people.”

Hermann clears his throat. He doesn’t want to admit it, but he’s jealous of how quickly Vik and Amara have built up intimacy. “My sentiments exactly, cadet.”

Vik just glares at him. “Not talking to you, science man.” To Amara she says, “Why is he in here? If he’s visiting the crazy guy in the basement, he could get possessed too.”

Amara makes eye contact with Hermann for a split second and he feels a twist in his gut.

“No, Vik, I think it’s okay. They haven’t drifted for ten years.”

Vik puts her arms around Amara’s shoulders. “Like that’s ever stopped anybody. All the time we are drifting.”

“Yeah, and it’s a pain in the ass,” Amara says loudly. The noise in the dormitory temporarily ceases and then resumes normal volume. Cadet Jinhai catches Vik’s eye and laughs, and suddenly all the cadets are laughing. All except for Amara. She sighs and folds her arms across her chest. It takes Hermann a few seconds to catch on, and then he realizes that they’re all ghost drifting.          

“It must be quite the strain,” he says, “Drifting with everyone like you do.”

Cadet Jinhai shrugs. He’s playing some kind of hologram game on his phone. “It is a bit of a brain orgy. But how are we supposed to criticize the program? We’re just cadets. They won’t listen to us.”

“And if we complain, we don’t get to pilot,” Vik adds.

“But – but – if you’re in discomfort, you should say something,” Hermann sputters. “There’s a reason that early rangers died or went brain dead from drifting with non-compatible partners. You all train in the kwoon, right?”

There’s a muttering that generally means consensus.

“I’m sorry, cadets, I had no idea that the drifting was not exactly…consensual. I should have done something before. To be honest, I am unsure of the future of the program. With the new mission to open a breach to the Anteverse, it’s unclear as to whether or not Jaegers will actually be…involved in any way.”

“Yeah, we’d heard something like that,” Jinhai says. “But there’ve been no direct orders, so for all we know it’s business as usual.”

Hermann has gradually started to notice that as the cadets talk, or move around the room, they’ll turn to someone who isn’t there, or start to say something and then stop themselves. He realizes uncomfortably whose bed he’s sitting on. Cadet Suresh Khurana, the only ranger casualty during the fight against Shrikethorn, Hakuja, and Raijin. He’s missing from their drift. It brings a whole new level to the phrase “ghost drifting”.

“I bet even more Jaegers could be improved with your rocket fuel,” Amara says eagerly to Hermann. “A whole fleet of flying Jaegers! Maybe even Jaegers in space!”

Hermann’s uncomfortable taking credit for the kaiju blood rocket fuel idea; he suspects that he picked the idea up from how much Newt and the Precursors were thinking about the same topic.

“As always, cadet, most of what you see on the Jaegers is implemented by Ms Reyes,” he says out loud. “I think of the grand ideas and she practically implements them. She’s the one you should be talking to.”

“Nothing much cooler than looking at Jaeger blueprints,” says a cadet whose voice he doesn’t recognize. Amara half-stands up.

“Seriously?” she says, hands balled into fists. “Can’t I nerd out in peace?”

“Maybe you can go somewhere else to nerd out, Amara,” Jinhai teases.

“Maybe I will.” Amara grabs a flannel and shoves her feet into her shoes. “Y’all can tell jokes in the drift without me, we’re going to Hermann’s room.”

“Oh, we are?” Hermann asks, rising with her. He’s eager to leave as well. He didn’t enjoy nor understand teenage drama even when he was a teenager. And it’s clear that Amara’s uncomfortable. Hermann still can’t get over how many drift partners she has. He’s become blind in the last few years. He let his melancholy distract him from so much – Newt’s changing behavior, the cadets’ exploitative drift practices…As the third (or possibly fourth) highest ranking official on the base, he should be doing better.

He should. But there’s only one person he wants to help.

Amara slams the door, which as a heavy metal door is very conducive to slamming. She stalks down the hall and Hermann hurries to keep up with her.

“Er, don’t you want to know what room we’re going to?”

She slows. “Yeah. I guess.” He catches up with her and they keep pace as they walk down the endless curving hallway of the dormitory floor. Hermann is housed next to the other scientists. He’s close enough to Iolana to hear her date her way through seemingly every female J-tech.

“Do you not like your drift partners?” Hermann asks as gently as he can.

“I wish you wouldn’t call them that,” Amara says. “It makes it sound like we have something special. Like it was during the war. What we have is nothing. It’s forced, it’s – it’s wrong. I hear everyone’s thoughts, and they hear my thoughts about Vik and her thoughts about _me_ and we don’t get physical privacy as it is. Can’t we just have our own heads? I was alone for so long and now everyone just gets shoved into my brain – “

“Is that why you designed Scrapper to be piloted solo?” Hermann asks. He’s been meaning to ask her this. It’s not like solo Jaegers haven’t been thought of; by him and by others. They have to be as small as Scrapper or smaller to carry the neural load. Small wasn’t exactly valued during the war, or now. There was never any point in having solo-piloted Jaegers. Even so, a nineteen-year-old building one herself out of junk Jaeger parts is impressive. Parts that he helped design, yes, but still admirable.

“Who was gonna pilot it with me? I lived alone. I don’t know drift engineering so I couldn’t make that part. So I guess Scrapper wasn’t a true Jaeger – we didn’t connect to each other’s brains. Controlling her was all mechanical until Shao installed that remote piloting stuff.”

They stop outside Hermann’s door and Amara slouches against the wall while Hermann pulls out his card pass. “Sometimes I fantasize about getting back in Scrapper,” she whispers. “Just packing my bag and escaping. I dunno where I’d go. It’s not like I could swim back to LA.”

Hermann opens the door and ushers her inside. It’s messy in there, but at least the bed and a chair is clear. “Why are you here if you don’t want to be?”

She flops down on the bed. “It was that or go to jail. For cannibalizing Jaeger parts and building my own.”

Hermann looks embarrassed and rubs his neck. “I…may have had something to do with that ruling. Early on, when all the Jaegers were getting scrapped, I was somewhat protective of them. Their pilots had died in them. I wanted them to be left as monuments. I was worried – I think we all were – of their parts being used by, I don’t know, rebels against the PPDC. I asked if the PPDC council could better protect old Jaegers somehow. Their rulings were rather strict.”

“And then they go and give the drone commission to someone like Liwen Shao,” Amara says loudly, throwing her hands in the air.

Hermann eases himself into the only chair in the room. “I had nothing to do with that. I’m sorry that you’re here in a program you don’t believe in, rather than going to something like engineering school where you belong. You’d excel at MIT. That’s Newt’s alma mater, you know. He taught there.”

Amara smiles faintly at the compliment. “Thanks. I thought about school, but there was no way they’d accept a greasy scrapyard urchin like me, even on a scholarship. The Jaeger program was really my only option.”

Hermann is starting to see that he was wise to choose an ally in Amara Namani. She’s someone discontent with the PPDC like him, and new enough that she’s not loyal yet. He isn’t sure how much to tell her about his plans, though. Her brain is hard-wired in to six other people’s. No, seven…

“Do you still ghost drift with Ranger Pentecost?” he asks suddenly. Amara wrinkles her nose.

“Ugh, yes. He’s so stressed he gives me anxiety dreams. And now I have this weird _thing_ about Ranger Lambert, which, _ew_. I just hope that when they start banging I don’t – “

“Does he know how you feel about the program?” Hermann interrupts, starting to blush. Amara’s social skills are somewhat poor, but in the opposite way from him in that she shares too much instead of too little. Must come from having lived alone for so long.

Amara cocks her head to one side. “I don’t think so. We don’t see each other that often, and our drift wasn’t all that strong, so I only get flashes. He must be too distracted to pay attention to what’s in my head. And his drift with Ranger Lambert is _much_ stronger. I get some of Nate’s memories, too, but not as much. Do you know how weird it is to have a bunch of straight guys’ memories in your head?”

“I can honestly say I do not,” says Hermann.

“Well, it sucks. 0/10 would not recommend.”

Hermann’s lip curls up at this bit of internet parlance that has survived some 20-odd years. It’s exactly the kind of thing Newt would say.

“Didn’t you say you had a favor to ask me?” Amara says.

“Ah, yes. Do you think you could get me a copy of the old Shibari software?”

Amara sits up excitedly. “Could I! Just give me your laptop and five minutes.”

Hermann pulls out his laptop, one of the few you can still get with a regular screen. Looking at a hologram for too long hurts his eyes. He signs in and hands the computer to Amara. She sits up and takes it eagerly.

“I’ll need your credit card. Should cost about five hundred American. Even I wasn’t able to get around that with my copy; I had to hack into some rich guy’s bank account.”

Hermann had expected to pay more, and it’s not like he ever buys anything. He digs out his wallet and hands Amara his card without protest.

“If I see any purchases larger than $500 on there, I’ll know,” he says sternly. She doesn’t hear him - already typing furiously, deep in concentration.

As she does this, Hermann opens his chest of drawers and closet and begins going through them. He tosses a few shirts aside until he pulls out a white Against Me! tour shirt. He folds it onto the bed and then flips through the row of slacks in his closet until he comes across one of his few “dressed-down” pairs of pants: black jeans that he doesn’t ever remember buying.

That is apparently enough to break Amara’s concentration. She looks up. “What are you doing?”

“Getting an outfit to send down to Newton,” Hermann mutters. He starts looking for a pair of sneakers that will fit Newt. What was he, a size 9?

“Doesn’t he have clothes?” Amara asks.

“They’ve not been washed, and he needs something more comfortable.”

Amara puts the laptop to the side and rifles through the clothing. She holds up the shirt that Hermann had just folded. “I don’t know who this band is, but I can’t see you liking them.”

Hermann snatches the shirt back. “It’s an old one of Newton’s. I sleep in it sometimes.”

Amara’s eyes widen and she flops back on the bed. “Oh my god, you are still head over heels, aren’t you? I cannot get over how in love you are.”

“Stop it.” Hermann adds a pair of socks and underwear to the neat pile.

“And now you’re using the power of gay love to save the day!”

“Really, cadet!” Hermann snaps.

She sits up and pulls the laptop back onto her lap. “Sorry, I thought we were bonding,” she pouts. That pout, and then the way she goes back to staring intently at the screen, reminds Hermann so much of a young Mako Mori that it makes Hermann’s chest ache. He will never stop being reminded of the legacy of the war.

Hermann finishes the pile of clothes for Newt just as Amara hands him his laptop back.

“Done! I scrubbed all traces of my Dark Web deeds from your history, and the Shibari program is ready to go.”

He accepts the computer back and clicks through the old program that he remembers so well.

“Whatever you want to translate, it should take a while on this machine,” Amara warns. “Shibari’s designed for computers with much more CPU, so it’ll probably make your laptop chug a chug for a few hours. I figured you wouldn’t want to use the PPDC mainframe to help it along, so I didn’t connect it to that. It’s your secret copy.”

Hermann looks up from it to give Amara a small smile. “I can’t thank you enough, cadet.”

She shrugs. “Eh, don’t worry about it. I hadn’t done anything illegal in about a week and I was getting itchy fingers. And can you call me Amara? My title just makes me feel faceless.”

“Very well, Amara. And you—” He takes a deep breath. She’s already saved him twice, she’s earned this. “You can call me Hermann.”

***

Hermann waits outside the Moyulan Shatterdome main gate a little nervously, wind blowing through his freshly-ironed slacks. Every time he’s seen Shao she’s been dressed in this month’s finest styles off the runway, so he doesn’t want to show up to dinner in a ratty cardigan. He’s dressed in his only suit and a dark blue tie. Liwen hasn’t contacted him since their initial phone call, so he has no idea what car to look for.

When the limousine pulls up, Hermann realizes that he should have expected it. He opens the door to get in the passenger seat, but the driver directs him to sit in the back. It’s big enough for a queen-sized bed back there, but he sits as close to the door as possible and ignores the drinks cooler.

When they arrive, Hermann has to double-check with the driver that he’s been taken to the right place. They’d skirted right around the expensive downtown districts and headed for a side street that the limousine barely fit down. After being assured that Shao is waiting for him, Hermann steps into the hole-in-the-wall dumpling place. All the formica-topped tables are empty except for one, where Liwen Shao sits noisily sipping a bubble tea. She’s wearing a pair of jeans and a blue windbreaker.

“<Hello, Dr. Gottlieb,>” she says casually. “<Want anything to eat? You speak Chinese, right?>”

“<Yes, I’ve lived here for almost six years.>” He looks around, still a little bewildered. “Er…<where is everyone?>”

Shao sits back in her chair and takes a bite of dumpling. “<I rented out the entire establishment for the night. Still cheaper than a table at a five-star restaurant. Go ahead and place your order, the kitchen is at your disposal.>”

Hermann goes up to the counter, where the cashier is vibrating nervously. Unless Shao comes here often, this woman probably doesn’t get to interact with many tech geniuses. She takes Hermann’s order of the first thing he sees on the menu – pork hom bao – and disappears into the back. Hermann sits opposite Shao at a chair with a cracking vinyl cushion. In response to his inquisitive look, she says,

“<Even I have to take a night off every now and then. Cancelling all today’s meetings has given me more free time than I’ve had all year.>” She gestures around the restaurant. “<My friends and I used to order from this place all the time when we lived down the street in college. It’s not very good, but it reminds me of being 16 again.>”

“<You’re just like Dr. Geiszler,>” Hermann says. “<Child prodigies, the both of you.>”

“<That was one of the reasons I hired him initially,>” Shao says. “<And he saved the world. He seemed perfect for the job. I even thought we would get along. We…>” She rolls the thought around her mouth a few times before continuing, “<did not.>”

Hermann smiles. “<Yes, there are very few people that Dr. Geiszler gets along with. I imagine he was even more difficult in the past few years.>”

“<He was a smug, stuck-up asshole,>” Shao says plainly. “<He just got to be more and more of an asshole right up until the end. We were all-out fighting for the last few weeks of the program. I didn’t want to boot him off when we were almost done. He changed a lot from when I first hired him. It happened so gradually that I didn’t really notice.>”

A waitress brings Hermann his food. The bao is better than he expected. The world is limping towards recovery, and rationing only just stopped two years ago. Hermann’s gotten used to a lot of rice and fish while living at Moyulan.

“<So since the Precursors have him, and they tried to end the world, why are you so keen to protect him?>” Shao asks. Hermann is used to more verbal games, so he’s somewhat glad that she’s getting right to the point. He hates this question, though. He has the feeling he’s going to be answering it a lot.

“<What the Precursors made Dr. Geiszler do was terrible. They _made_ him do it. They used him without his consent and manipulated his brain. No one else is on his side, so I have to be.>”

“<He tried to strangle you,>” Shao points out, just as she had on the base yesterday. Hermann isn’t likely to forget any time soon. Whatever hurt he feels, though, is a fraction of what Newt’s going through. The bruises are a reminder of that.

“<The _Precursors_ tried to strangle me.>”

Shao rolls her eyes. He can see it’s going to be a challenge for her to get around this. “<You stopped me from shooting him. I could have ended it then and there.>”

“<Newt does not deserve to die for what happened to him,>” Hermann says testily. “<He’s innocent – the Precursors are not. Speaking of pointing guns at innocent people, you also pointed it at me, which I did not appreciate. I read somewhere that you’re only supposed to point guns at people you’re intending on shooting.>”

They stare at each other for a few moments. Then Shao says, “<I’ve never fired it before. It was just in case of industrial espionage. If something happened to my guards.>”

Hermann sighs. “<Let’s try not to get at each other’s throats. We have to be in the same lab for the foreseeable future. We worked well together on modifying the Jaegers, at least,>” he says. “<I hope that we can continue to have that kind of relationship. I’m not going to be involved much with the Anteverse ships and – Lord knows I want to be. I will let you do however you please as long as you let my team do whatever we please to get the Breach to open.>”

Shao finishes off her bubble tea with a last noisy drink. “<Anything else you want from me, since you made me drop everything for this?>”

Hermann leans forward. “<Don’t release Newt’s name to the public. I know people will figure out eventually – it’s not exactly secret that he drifted and then joined your team – but we can at least put it off for a little while. If it’s all conjecture instead of official, he might be able to have somewhat of a life.>”

He had hated the proposition when Ranger Lambert had given it, but the more he thinks about it the better it sounds. When he fixes Newt, it’ll help if he’s not reviled as the man who tried to end the world. Hermann knows he’d done it against his will, but he doubts many others will care.

Shao raises one delicate eyebrow at him. “<People are clamoring to find out who this mysterious person I keep blaming is. You want me to invent some Zhang San as a scapegoat? Falsify records of him having worked under me? Grab a stock photo off the internet and pretend it’s him?”> She pauses, and nods. “<I guess I could do that. You’ll owe me one, though.>”

“<You pointed a gun at me, I think we’re even now.>”

Shao throws back her head and laughs. “<You aren’t going to let that go, are you?>”

"<I will now. Thank you, Ms. Shao, I really mean it.>” He holds up some rice. “<To our future working partnership.>”

 Shao holds up a piece of dumpling, and their chopsticks click together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The name that Shao uses is the Chinese equivalent of John Doe. As always, please leave kudos and comments!


	8. Chapter 8

Eight Days After the Almost-Apocalypse:   

The Precursors don’t want to put on the clothing that Hermann sent. A lot of their decisions over the years have baffled Newt, their choice of wardrobe being no exception. He supposes that they want him to be as far from his old self as possible. They sit there in the cell with their arms folded as one of the handlers sets the pile of clothing down. Newt recognizes the shirt as one he thought he’d lost about three moves ago. Had Hermann stolen it? That sly, wonderful, hopelessly romantic man.

When it doesn’t seem like the Precursors are going to get dressed (and Newt knows they’re starting to smell), the handler summons more people to help and they start to forcibly strip Newt’s body. He retreats into a memory. He doesn’t need to be aware for this.

He’s pulled out of an _Akira_ re-watch by Hermann’s voice.

“You look a lot more comfortable.”

He’s back in the bondage chair, with Hermann sitting in front of him holding a notepad.

“Do you think you can influence him with _clothing_?” the Precursors sneer. Yes, he can, and that’s exactly what they’re afraid of. Newt can sense the Precursors’ panic more and more the longer they’re in the basement of the Shatterdome. He can feel their addiction to Alice like a scratch inside himself that he can’t reach. She’s still nearby, and Newt wishes he could tell Hermann to just destroy the thing, smash the tank. Unfortunately, that’s an off-limits sentence.

“I just wanted you to be comfortable, Newt,” Hermann says, and gives him a look that pierces right through the outer Precursor layer. Buried inside himself, Newt sees it. “What music would you like to listen to today?”

_How about the band whose t-shirt I’m wearing? Do you have anything by them?_

“I’m thinking Linkin Park. Do you remember them from the early aughts?”

The first song plays about two notes before Newt surfaces.

“<Good God, dude, you really know how to push my buttons,>” he gasps like a diver coming up for air. “<Linkin Park? Really?>”

“<As has been noted before, pushing your buttons is my specialty,>” says Hermann with a fond smile. “<How are you holding up?>”

“<I appreciate the clothing. Things are getting better, I just…wish I could be out. They’re not as strong anymore because—because – >”

He wrestles for a few seconds, having a fierce internal tug-of-war with the Precursors. Even if he could get just a few words out about Alice, Hermann would figure it out. He’s a smart guy. Hermann watches him struggle with no small amount of worry.

“<You keep trying to tell me something,>” he says. “<Something important. But the Precursors won’t let you?>”

“<Yes,>” Newt gasps. He’s struggling to breathe, like something is filling up his lungs, and a few seconds later, blood is dripping out of his nose. He tilts his head back.

“<Pinch the bridge of my nose, won’t you, Herms?>”

“<I will _not_ ,>” Hermann says vehemently. “<Tilting your head back causes the blood to run down your throat. You’re supposed to keep your head level.>”

“<Nah, dude, I’m pretty sure that was disproved like, thirty years ago. Blood doesn’t run from your nose to your throat, that’s wild.>”

He catches Hermann’s eye and they smile at the quibbling. That, more than anything, feels like a breath of air. Newt gives a small nod to encourage Hermann to keep going. Hermann takes the hint and plunges on,

“<You’ve been out of it for eight years or so, you can’t be expected to know all the latest medical discoveries. For all you know, the current opinion could be that in order to stop a nosebleed, you need to suspend yourself upside-down to reverse the blood flow.>”

“<Pretty sure it’s not, though, babes.>”

The pet name slips out before he can stop it. His attention isn’t really on his speech, it’s on holding the Precursors off. The argument is just a vessel for that. He notices Hermann flinch at the word.

“<Still a sore subject? All these years later?>”

Hermann sighs and looks away. “<With you here, in front of me, looking like this? How can it not be?>”

“<You kept my shirt.>”

“<I don’t have a lot of clothing.>”

“<All the more significant that you kept it, then. I’m glad _someone_ still has my fashion sensibilities, even if I can’t. >” Hermann is still looking away. _Look at me, please, I want to see your eyes._ He can’t tell Hermann that exploring his borrowed memories is the only way Newt’s stayed sane for the better part of a decade. Can’t tell him that he’s relived every moment of their short-lived relationship a hundred times over. “<Hey, how do I look after that epic beatdown?>”

Hermann’s eyes glance back at his face and he winces.

“<That bad, huh?>”

“<It’s not pretty.>”

“<Dammit! And I looked so good before.>”

Hermann’s wince turns into that gorgeous half-smile. “<Your looks were certainly helped along by those suits. You looked like an even bigger asshole than before.>”

If Newt could clap his hands over his eyes, he would. (Even without the chair, he thinks he’s only in possession of his mouth right now. It’s always been his fastest-moving body part. There’s a lot you can do with a mouth.)

“<Please don’t mention those suits. I don’t want to wear a suit ever again. Hey, aren’t you supposed to be asking me questions about the Precursors?>”

Hermann makes a pretense of shuffling his notes, though Newt doesn’t think they’re going to stick to the pre-approved ones. “<Earlier you said that the Precursors are getting weaker. Is what I’m doing helping?>”

“<I don’t know if you noticed, but this is the longest I’ve been able to talk to you this entire time.>”

And it’s soon to come to an end, he’s afraid. The Precursors know there’s no point in trying to fool Hermann, and he can sense they’re glad they don’t have to pretend to be Newt while Hermann’s around. They’ve got more important things to chitter about in the back of his mind, like how they’re going to get to Alice. They’re junkies in need of a drift fix.

As he has the thought, it alerts them, and they pluck control out of his mental hands. He’s exhausted anyway, like holding a door closed with his body against a ravaging hoard. They fling the door open and overrun him.

“Time for Newt to go back in his box, we think,” the Precursors hiss to Hermann. “You may think he’s getting stronger, but he’s not strong enough.”

Hermann stands up and draws himself to his full height. “Newton is the strongest man I know,” he says with conviction.

Newt wishes he believed in himself as much as Hermann did.

 

Nine Days After the Almost-Apocalypse:

Hermann comes into Newt’s cell the next day looking excited. Newt thinks maybe he found out about Alice, and then Hermann pulls out his laptop and shows him a message that looks to be displayed on the Hong Kong Shatterdome’s Shibari decryption software. Where the hell did Hermann get a copy of that?

“<It’s a letter from Tendo,>” Hermann says in breathless German. “<He sent it to me a few days ago and I just managed to decrypt it. Shibari wasn’t running well on my computer, so I made a few adjustments. It’s really not designed for laptops.>”

“God, why do I care?” the Precursors ask, which is the opposite of what Newt would have said. He lost contact with Tendo, and pretty much everyone else, around about the time the Precursors fully took over.

Hermann scowls at them. “Shut up, Precursors. Oh well, you’ll both get to read this. I’m not reading it out loud because – <you know why.>” He nods towards the camera and then holds up the laptop so Newt can read the decrypted message.

_Dear Hermann:_

_I hope that you’re able to crack this message and read it without the PPDC seeing it. I hope I don’t have to tell you not to show this message to anyone in the PPDC. Things are not looking good with them right now._

_Oddly enough, I’m actually working with the PPDC again –_ oh, Newt, he retired about three years after the end of the war. Last I heard he was in Peru – _at the Sydney Shatterdome under Marshal Hansen. He convinced me to come out of retirement. Said if anybody could help him with internal problems, it was me. Truth is, we’ve all been getting more and more worried about the PPDC’s militarization in the last few years. That’s why I had this encrypted with Shibari. I don’t want them seeing this. I’m not officially back in Sydney._

_It would be great to talk to you, but I don’t know how secure this connection is, even encrypted, and there are some things we can only explain in person. I know it may feel like only you can keep an eye on things in Moyulan. Trust me, we can fix the PPDC from the inside if we’re all together. Come to Sydney if you can to see me, the marshal, and Ranger Becket. Yep – Hansen dragged him out of retirement too. Unofficially, like me. There are quite a few people ‘unofficially’ at the Sydney Shatterdome._

_See you, bud,_

_Tendo Choi, J-Tech_

_PS: I have a feeling Newt was tied up with recent events. Is he doing okay? We’re all wondering._

“Getting the gang back together, eh?” the Precursors ask. They hum and drum their fingernails against the arms of the chair. “I wouldn’t think Ranger Becket would want to be back there. Lots of painful memories for him, huh?”

Hermann’s mouth presses into a tight line, and he snaps his laptop shut. “Don’t talk about him,” he says furiously.

_I wish I could mourn alongside you, Hermann, with all of them. Set me free, we’ll go to Sydney together. I’ll get the Precursors under control, I promise I will, if you’ll just – destroy – Alice!_

Out loud the Precursors say, “Is that a bit of a sore subject for you? Knowing that Mako Mori was killed by a man who watched her grow up?”

Hermann closes his eyes. His long lashes cast shadows against his cheeks. Newt remembers kissing tears off those lashes. They’re something he often thinks about when thinking about Hermann. They’re probably one of the most conventionally beautiful parts of him. And there aren’t many conventional things about him.

“Have you got any questions for us – me?” the Precursors correct. Hermann sets his laptop down against the chair legs and sits down. He pulls out his handwritten notes, the notes recording the meager scraps of information Newt’s been able to give him.

“<How about this. A question for a question? I’ll ask you something, and then you get to ask me something.>”

There’s a pause as the Precursors translate, and then say, “Are you asking him? Or us?”

Hermann just smiles. The Precursors throw their head back to huff out a breath and look at the ceiling, and in that moment, a fierce battle wages. Newt straps into the conn-pod of the almost-fully functional Treble Pythagoras and exerts years’ worth of built-up mental energy. The Precursors chitter and hiss, but by the time Newt puts his head back down in the cell, his nose is dribbling blood.

“<I’ll ask first. Did they ever make the third _Star Wars_ trilogy? >”

Hermann looks at him with fondness and mock annoyance. “<Newton, you _know_ Hollywood was destroyed during the war. >”

"<I know, I just thought they might have…fixed it.>”

 “<No, there haven’t been a lot of new films produced. We get a few non-US ones every year. There isn’t even that much propaganda. German noir is making a comeback.>”

 “<Only you would be excited about that, Herms.>”

Hermann smiles at the nickname, which Newt knows is better than any pet name. “<Your turn to ask a question,>” Newt prompts. “<They’re getting weaker, but I still only get about five minutes of airtime.>”

Hermann pauses, and opens and closes his mouth a few times. Finally he says softly, “<Did the Precursors break up with me, or did you?>”

 Newt almost loses control in the conn-pod, he’s so gutted by the question. “<God, Herm…>” Hermann is just watching him, the harsh light of the room casting harsher shadows on his face. Newt has been retreating into memories of sunlight more and more this week. “<You have to understand how it was at first. I didn’t really know what was happening to me. And then I started having these blackouts. By the time I realized it was the Precursors there wasn’t much I could do. The real me still slipped out every now and then. It was during one of those times that I started that fight.>”

 The worst fight they’d ever had. Screaming, crying, throwing things. Ancient receipts dug up from grievances long-thought forgotten. Words that actually stung, rather than comforted in their banality. Newt doesn’t revisit that memory very often.

 “<I knew that if I stayed much longer with you, they would find a way to—to get inside you. And I knew that whatever I did, you would come back to me. So I had to make it as bad a fight as I could.>”

 Hermann’s head is bowed. When he speaks, his voice is wavering. “<I wanted to marry you, Newton.>”

 Newt wants to cry at the injustice of it all; the lost time and missed opportunities. “<Do you know how catastrophic that would have been? They would have gotten hold of you and then we’d have both been lost.>”

 “<At least you wouldn’t have been alone. If you’d stayed we could have solved it together. You could have let me help you.>”

 “<I haven’t had a lot of choices in the last few years, Hermann.>” Newt wanted to cry before, and now he laughs a high-pitched, anxious laugh. “<That was the last big choice I got to make. Can’t you let me have my big damn heroic sacrifice?>”

 Hermann leans forward and, somewhat awkwardly, takes his hand through the restraint.

 “<You did it without me. Again.>”

 “<Yeah. I guess I did.>”

 They sit there holding hands for a long while. Even when the Precursors gain control again, Hermann Gottlieb does not let go of Newt’s hand.

 

Ten Days After the Almost-Apocalypse:

Hermann wheels a cart into Newt’s cell, then stops and unhooks his cane from it. The guards take the lids off of what turn out to be trays of food and inspect them. After they don’t find any razors, or whatever else they were looking for, they nod to Hermann and leave. Hermann starts to unload the trays off the cart.

“What’s all this?” the Precursors sneer.

“I thought we might finally have that dinner, even if we are in the worst circumstances possible,” Hermann says calmly.

“Are you going to feed him like a baby?” the Precursors mock. Newt, on the other hand, is melting from the romance. When they were dating, Hermann was always doing sweet romantic gestures like this. He had been wondering about how he was going to eat as well, though. The whole point of this bondage chair was that he couldn’t reach his hands to his face.

“I thought I’d sit back here and toss popcorn into your mouth,” Hermann says. He puts a tray into Newt’s lap and then balances the other tray on his own. “No, I thought you’d be growing tired of ration food. This is the best dim sum within ten miles of the base.”

The Precursors smirk. “You know he still can’t taste anything, right?”

Hermann shrugs. His mouth is full and he wipes at his lips primly with a napkin. “I’m enjoying it.”

The smug bastard! Newt gains control within the Treble just from the fuel that sentence alone gives him.

“<Oh, god, _thanks_ , really glad you’re having a nice meal.>” He looks down at the tray in his lap, unsure if he’ll be able to taste anything on it even while he’s in control. “<Hermann, please, stuff a dumpling in my mouth, I’m begging you.>”

Hermann indulges him and puts a small bite of siu mai in his mouth. Newt chews for a few seconds. Then he swallows and shakes his head. There’s nothing. It’s as if he was chewing plastic.

“<I can’t taste it. Doesn’t matter if it’s the worst rations or the fanciest dim sum, I can’t taste a damn thing.>”

Hermann puts a hand on his cheek. He puts a thumb on Newt’s lower lip, the other hand on Newt’s wrist to brace his weight. “<Can you feel this?>” he breathes as he runs his thumb back and forth.

Newt just nods, his eyes wide. He’s so caught up in a heady rush of adrenaline that he lets control slip. The Precursors grab Treble Pythagoras out of his mental grasp and hiss at his emotions disapprovingly.

_You have no control over the effect Hermann has on my body, dudes._

Something must change in Newt’s eyes so that Hermann has enough time to snatch his hand away before the Precursors bite his thumb off. They would, too, if they could. He keeps his hand on Newt’s wrist, a hand that Newt can’t feel. Newt still feels warmth in his chest from the gesture.

“There’s nothing you can do to drive me away,” Hermann says, and since he’s speaking English he must be talking to the Precursors. “You can bite me and yell at me and insult my human intelligence all you want. I won’t budge.”

“Why are you doing all this for him?” the Precursors snarl. “He broke up with you. You two hate each other!”

“Hate?” Hermann says mildly. “Hate and love are two sides of the same coin. You’re in Newt’s head, so perhaps you know him better than me. I doubt it, since you’re million-year-old aliens with no concept of human emotions. I’ll tell you this, Newton Geiszler, and I don’t care who else hears, because I think you need to hear it. I will never stop helping you. Do you understand me? These last few years I have been without my partner…my friend…the other side of my coin. I’ve felt incomplete in a lot of ways. If I’d only been less of a coward, I could have reached out sooner and solved this whole mess years ago. For that I am truly sorry. I know what you’ll say.” He says with a surprisingly good American accent: “’Don’t beat yourself up, Herms!’ And I could say the same to you. What’s happened here is no one’s fault but the Precursors.”

The Precursors glare at him, but they’re finding it hard to see because their eyes – Newt’s eyes – are filling up with tears. There are so many things he’s imagined Hermann saying. This is what he needs to hear most of all. As the tears start to trickle down Newt’s cheeks, Hermann says softly,

“I’m doing this because I love you, Newt.”

If there were ever a time for Newt to gain control this would be it. Unfortunately, that word is on a list of words the Precursors never allowed him to say to Hermann because they knew he would come running. That, along with “help”. It takes all his mental strength just to get control back for a few seconds. Blood starts gushing out of Newt’s nose. Through it, and through gritted teeth that are working against him, Newt chokes out the word,

“L-uh-ve.”

Then the Precursors slam back in control. Newt has always scoffed a bit at the power of love in movies, and now it’s the one thing the Precursors can’t touch. They can’t remove Newt’s love for Hermann Gottlieb.

Hermann smiles and whips out a handkerchief – _of course you’ve got one, old man who’s actually old now, never change_ – and wipes away Newt’s tears and bloody nose. The Precursors try to pull away, but there’s no escaping Hermann. He leans close and presses a kiss to Newt’s forehead. The Precursors bare their teeth. Hermann smiles at the real Newt underneath.

“<Keep fighting. I’ll have you out of here soon.>”


	9. Chapter 9

“When was the last time you ate in the cafeteria?” Amara asks Hermann, her mouth full of fried rice.

“Hmm?” Hermann asks, re-focusing his attention on the here and now. Amara and Iolana have managed to drag him to dinner away from his drift and Breach research. He’s been pulling twelve- and fourteen-hour days since he got permission to start talking to Newt. None of his reports have yielded that much helpful information, which Hermann feels isn’t going to fly for very much longer.

“Since last July,” Iolana answers for him. She sticks an entire gyoza into her mouth. Hermann clicks his tongue at the two of them.

“You both have such appalling manners.”

“Oh, I’m very sorry, how inappropriate of me,” Iolana mocks in a British accent.

“If you haven’t been out in public, how would you know what manners are?” Amara says. She scrapes the last of her rice out of her bowl inefficiently with chopsticks. “For all you know, talking with your mouth full could be polite now.”

“I’ve been out in public, Amara,” Hermann splutters. “Just not in the mess hall. I take dinner in the lab, usually.”

“That’s not true, I _brought_ you dinner until I realized I was playing into every stereotype and made you come get it yourself,” Iolana corrects. Hermann winces.

“Yes, have I mentioned how sorry I am for that? I sometimes…force people to take care of me by proximity.”

“You’ve apologized several times, and I shall continue to hear your apologies.” Iolana wipes the last bit of soy sauce up with her gyoza and pops it into her mouth. “There! Are we ready to go?”

“Where are we going again?” Hermann asks as they all stand and begin to clear their trays. “Is it movie night? It is Thursday, right?”

There is no official movie night in Moyulan, not like there was in Hong Kong and Alaska and pretty much every other shatterdome Hermann’s been where Newt or Tendo also lived. Instead, the cadets put up a sheet in their dorm and all pile onto a few bunk beds to watch old classics like _Pirates of the Caribbean_ or _Toy Story 3._ Amara invited him and Iolana to one after she’d spent the last few days hanging out in their lab. Hermann tried to foist Amara off on Jules, but she seemed to have imprinted on him and Iolana. More on Iolana, if he was being honest. The first time Liwen Shao walked into the lab while Amara was also there, she turned pink and disappeared for a while. Next time Hermann saw Amara, she was whispering and giggling with Iolana. From then on, Iolana had been flirting outrageously with Shao. To Hermann’s surprise, Shao had been playing along.

“We’re watching _The Dark Knight_ , by popular vote,” Amara says. “Supposed to be really good.”

“It’s a perfectly acceptable film. I prefer _The Dark Knight Rises_ ,” Hermann says. Iolana snorts. “What?” he asks defensively.

“Nobody prefers _The Dark Knight Rises_ ,” she says as they make their way out of the mess hall and towards the sleeping quarters. “Probably because you can’t actually understand what the villain is saying most of the time.”

“Bane is a great villain!” Hermann protests. “You Americans just can’t be bothered to understand British accents.”

His phone dings, and he pulls it out to check it while Amara and Iolana continue to banter.

KARLA: <Call incoming from Father. Did you hear about the PPDC putting him back on the council?>

Hermann stumbles over his feet, and Iolana and Amara turn back to check on him.

“Whoa, Hermann, are you okay?” Iolana asks. He must look pale and stricken. He feels like he’s going to have a panic attack. He tamps it in long enough to stammer out,

“F-family emergency. You two go along without me, I-I have to…um…take a call.”

“Okay,” says Amara, sounding worried and a little dejected. He pushes past them and on towards his room as fast as his legs can take him. He frantically starts to clean up his room, or at least shove some things in his drawers or in the closet and make his bed. Lars Gottlieb will want to make a hologram call to see how his son is doing.

He picks up his phone to send a thank-you text to Karla when it buzzes with an incoming holo-call. Hermann takes a deep breath, brushes his hands through his hair, and answers it.

He purposefully hasn’t seen his father in a long time. Lars looks older than Hermann expected. He’s well into his seventies, yes, but the only word to describe him is _decrepit_. His eyes are sunk into his head and liver spots cover his forehead and hands. His skin is brittle and stretched over his bones. He still looks at Hermann with that piercing stare that Hermann can sometimes still feel on the back of his neck.

“<Congratulations on your re-instatement, Father,>” Hermann says before he can speak. “<Karla just told me.>”

Lars is seated, and Hermann notices a cane to match his own leaning against his chair. Lars folds his hands and looks at Hermann over the top of his glasses. He’d never needed glasses before. They only serve to intensify his stare.

"<Yes, they rather needed more leadership after the Tokyo fiasco,>” his father says. “<The council tells me you’ve got your boyfriend locked up in the basement there at Moyulan.>”

Hermann once loved hearing people call Newt his boyfriend. Hearing it now out of his father’s mouth sets his teeth on edge. “<Ex-boyfriend,>” he corrects, though he’s not sure that the distinction is all that important now. “<Yes, Newton is here with me.>”

“<It was him I called to talk to you about,>” Lars says. Hermann’s breath catches and he can feel his heart accelerating – more so than it already was. Internally he starts a half-remembered prayer from temple services with his mother. _Hear my cry, O God; attend unto my prayer. From the end of the earth will I call unto Thee, when my heart fainteth…_

“<What about Newton?>” Hermann asks, realizing as he says it that he sounds defensive.

“<While I realize that you were tasked with extracting information from him, I’ve read your reports and it doesn’t seem like he’s giving you much information about the Anteverse. Now, I don’t blame you.>” He holds up a hand to forestall the words about to come out of Hermann’s open mouth. “<You are obviously emotionally compromised. While that upstart Ranger Pentecost may have indulged you, the PPDC council will not. Dr. Geiszler will be moved to the Hong Kong Shatterdome in two days’ time.>”

“<No - >” Hermann protests, not even realizing he’s said anything. His father steamrollers over him,

“<It’s what should have been done in the first place.>”

“<This was your idea, wasn’t it?>” Hermann says angrily. “<They were perfectly content with what I was doing before you came along. I just need more time. I’ve only been working with Newt for a few days. The Precursors’ hold on him is growing weaker, I can get more information on him once it weakens further - >”

"<That is the exact opposite of what we want!>” His father leans forward in his chair, his holographic eyes glittering from their sunken sockets. “<Dr. Geiszler’s connection with the Precursors must remain strong if we are to have an advantage over them in the Anteverse.>”

“<The mission to take an army to the Anteverse is an even worse plan than the Wall of Life, and we all know how that went,>” Hermann spits. There was a point in his life when he would have been terrified to speak out against his father. The few times he had, it’d been over the Wall of Life. Now he's past caring.

His father’s face twists into a snarl. “<How dare you! This insolence is beyond the pale.>”

“<I am forty-six years old, Father,>” Hermann says stiffly. “<I am not a child you can spank anymore. I won’t let you talk to me in such a way, whether you’re my superior officer or not. I will tell you what I told you when you came up with the Wall of Life: you’re an aging fool, and your plan is going to cost untold lives and money. I can’t remember how many times you said you were ashamed of me. I am ashamed, yes, to be your son.>”

He dispels the hologram with an angry wave. It’s only the second time in his life he’s hung up on his father. He feels no guilt, or giddiness. Only panic. Two days…not enough time, not nearly enough time.

Hermann slips into the cadets’ dormitory. The movie is only a few minutes in; people are still whispering and handing each other snacks. Amara is sitting with Vik, and Iolana beside them. He taps on both of their shoulders.

“Could I speak to you for a few minutes?” he whispers. Amara drags her eyes away from the screen and disentangles herself from Vik. Iolana looks back and stares at him.

“Hermann, what’s wrong?” she whispers. “You look like your dog just died.”

“Tell you outside,” he replies, and heads out. They’re only a few seconds behind him, and as soon as Amara shuts the door she says,

“Is it about that phone call you took?”

“Shush!” Hermann hisses. He looks around furtively and beckons them to follow them to his room. Even Iolana can’t hide the worried expression on her face. Hermann waits until they’re in his room with the door locked to say,

“The call was from my father. He’s been reinstated on the PPDC council to replace Secretary General Mori.”

“Lars Gottlieb, that grade-A asshole!” Iolana exclaims. “No offense.”

“None taken. That is the mildest of things you could call him,” Hermann says bitterly. “He basically called me to gloat. They’re moving Newt to Hong Kong in only a few days’ time. They’re going to try and bring the Precursors out, and use him to fight their idiotic war, and I’ll never get to see him again.”

“How can the Precursors be brought out if they’re getting weaker, like you say?” Amara asks. She sits heavily on the bed and springs up and down a few times. “If we can free Newt, he won’t have to go to Hong Kong.”

“Oh, he’ll still be locked up,” Hermann says darkly. “For now his name hasn’t been released. Mark my words, though, the PPDC will put him on a secret trial and—execute him, or I don’t know what. There is a chance, however. I recently received an invitation from my old friend Tendo Choi. He’s invited me to come to the Sydney Shatterdome, where Hercules Hansen is still marshal.”

“Herc Hansen of the Striker Eureka?” Amara exclaims. Her knowledge of war heroes apparently knows no limits.

“You’re worse than Newt and movie facts,” Hermann sighs. “Yes, that Marshal Hansen. I think if I escape with Newt, we’ll be safe there. Tendo doesn’t trust the PPDC.”

“Neither do I, anymore,” Iolana says. She’s leaning against Hermann’s desk, a calculating look in her eyes. “I can’t work for a military dictatorship anymore. If you’ll have me, Hermann…” She meets his gaze. “I want to come with you.”

“Me too!” Amara says, jumping up. “You can’t leave me behind, Hermann, you just can’t, you know how bad it is for me here—”

“Of course you can come,” Hermann says, taken aback. “I didn’t want you two getting mixed up in my problems. I can see now that my problems are similar to ones many people are having – the PPDC is no longer a force for good.”

“I’d known it for a while,” Iolana sighs. “I suppose I was being selfish. You read online how bad it still is across the world. I liked being sheltered, having my work, leading a team. Now we have to end things if we can.”

"I don’t know if we’ll get that far,” Hermann says. Herc Hansen, Tendo Choi, Raleigh Beckett, and him and Newt may have helped save the world before. They also had a thousand-odd J-techs and support people at their backs. Now, what did they have? His friends, yes, and a Newton trapped inside his own head, versus a war-hungry global-spanning military organization. One thing must be tackled at a time.

“How soon are they moving Newt?” Amara asks. She has her mouth set in a determined line. Hermann’s seen this expression before, when she was working out a problem with Iolana. The girl can hyper-focus with the best of them.

 “Two days,” Hermann says. Two days to pack his life into a bag, arrange or steal transport to Sydney, and get Newt out of his cellar. “I know it’s not a lot of time. And there’s Newton to consider – if only he were conscious.”

 Iolana pulls out her tablet and shows the other two a holographic display matching the one in her workspace. “You see this map?” she asks. They nod. “You see any red spaces?”

"Uh…is this a trick question?”

“No, you don’t, because _I can’t find any Breaches_. Nada. Zilch. Hermann, you looked, I looked, even on land. There’s nothing. I know that was your hunch, that the Precursors were controlling Newt through some other Breach. It’s got to be so small that we can’t detect it, but I checked for that. Ugh!” Iolana puts her hands on her bun and walks around in frustration. “This is so stupid. I wish we could just…ask Newt.”

Hermann goes very still and stares at her. “Why can’t we?” he says.

***

“Hermann, this is nuts,” Amara protests as they haul the cart full of equipment out of the elevator.

“No, that’s ableist, and this is something I should have tried ages ago.” Hermann limps alongside the overladen cart, careful to see that nothing falls off. “Newt needs it anyway. He can’t feel or taste anything. I owe him this respite.”

“I have to side with Amara on this one,” Iolana says. “But it’s your brain.”

“Have you ever built drift equipment before?” Amara asks. “Scrapper didn’t have it, so I haven’t either. I can probably help you with the mechanics of it, though.”

“Newton did it once,” says Herman firmly. “I can do it too.”

“Notice, that didn’t really answer your question,” says Iolana to Amara, giving Hermann a sidelong glance. “I wouldn’t worry too much. Most of this stuff is half-assembled anyway. The only problem is gonna be monitoring their brains. This equipment doesn’t have anything like that.”

“I would have stolen that if you gave me enough time,” Amara hisses. “I have to return a lot of this to the cadets’ training area in the morning.”

“You got this from the – “ Hermann starts, and then cuts himself off. “Never mind. I told you I didn’t care where you got it, didn’t I?”

“You did,” Amara says. She huffs some hair out of her face. “Wow, I’ve done some illegal stuff in my time, but helping Dr. Hermann Gottlieb drift with Dr. Newton Geiszler, who’s also drifting with some Kaiju, is just. A Lot.”

“He’s not currently drifting with the Kaiju,” Hermann says. They stop at the door to Newton’s cell and Hermann pulls out his keycard. “I hope this thing works for both doors, I haven’t tried it on this one yet…That’s part of the problem. I don’t know how the Kaiju still have hold over him when he’s not actively drifting. Ah-ha, yes!”

The cell door opens to Hermann’s cloned card. Newt is sitting up on his bed, eyes eerily staring straight ahead. His eyes only flick over to them when Iolana and Amara bring the cart fully into the room.

“What’s this for, Hermann?” he asks in that dismissive, overly-high pitched voice that Hermann has come to recognize as the Precursors talking. “Time for a little brain sex? Don’t know why you need the ladies here for it.”

Iolana doesn’t gasp, precisely, but Hermann hears her breath catch in her throat. He realizes that this is the first time she’s seen Newt. He looks over at her and Amara. Amara’s looking reluctant as well. She’s only seen him once. Neither of them have been down here every day like Hermann has.

“It’s okay,” Hermann assures them. “He – or rather, they - won’t hurt us.” He isn’t entirely sure of this. These next few seconds are the test. He turns to Newt. “Would you like to drift with me?”

An unearthly light seems to shine behind Newt’s eyes. “Oh, Hermann, I thought you’d never ask,” he breathes. So far, so good. Hermann gives them the ultimatum.

“On one condition: you agree to be restrained for it.”

Newt’s face curls into an expression of distaste for a split second, and then he shrugs. “Sure, if it makes you feel better. Not gonna take me to that chair, are you? Unless you want to carry me. Still can’t walk.”

Hermann had forgotten about his legs, still swollen and in braces from the torture. Newt’s usually already restrained in the chair by the time he gets to the interrogation room every day. He assumes it’s something the “handlers” take care of.

Newt indicates to a ring attached to the wall. “You can attach me to this if you really want. They hook me up to it when I’m getting particularly loud.” He winks at Hermann. “Pretty kinky down here, right?”

Hermann swallows, and nods. “Very well.” He steps forward and clamps the manacles hanging from the ring to Newt. He expects the Precursors to antagonize him more. They’re too focused on the drift equipment, however. Of course they’d be eager to get inside his head.

Between the three of them, Iolana, Hermann, and Amara have the drift machine assembled in about fifteen minutes. Iolana puts the Pons on Newt and hands Hermann’s to him. As he puts it on, she steps close enough to be considered looming over him.

“If you’re in any sign of distress, I _will_ pull the plug,” she says. She makes sure Hermann’s looking her in the eye. “No matter if it damages him or if it damages you, I’ll do it. You’re my friend and I can’t risk the Precursors getting in your head, too.”

“I understand.” Hermann takes Iolana’s hand and squeezes it. “Thank you. You’re a good friend.”

Iolana rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling. “Yeah, whatever. Don’t get mushy on me now.” She takes a deep breath, and nods to Amara. “Initiating neural handshake in 3…2…1…”

Hermann did not think he could forget how disorienting and awful the drift felt in ten years. He finds now that he had remembered it being drastically better than it actually was. It starts like an inside-out sneeze, building up to a wrenching and scooping out of the mind. Who is he? He is—he is—

“Hermann?”

He blinks and opens his eyes. Instead of the pale blue of the drift, like he was expecting, he is standing in the darkened conn-pod of an unfamiliar Jaeger. He’s strapped in to the harness, with his feet clamped to the floor. He looks around wildly, and to his left, face shocked inside his drift helmet, is Newt.

“Hermann! You’re really here!”

Newt starts to fumble frantically with his harness. He ends up unclipping half the connecting wires and wrenching himself free the rest of the way. Something pops free with a shower of sparks. Hermann is still standing stock-still, trying to process what’s going on. Newt runs over and starts to unclip his drift helmet.

“<Wh-where are we?>”

“<First time we’re talking freely in almost nine years and you’re asking that?>” Newt finishes taking his helmet off and presses his forehead to Hermann’s own helmet. His breath fogs up Hermann’s visor, and through his confusion, Hermann smiles wide enough to make his cheeks hurt.

“<You can talk? You’re all right?>”

Here Newt looks like the platonic ideal of himself. He’s got his glasses on, and has a healthy amount of pudge around his middle. Hermann hadn’t realized how much he’d missed either of those things.

“<For a given value of all right. I haven’t gone crazy. This is me, though, Herms, the real deal. The one who’s been peeking through for the last few days. I would say in the flesh, but we’re in each other’s heads, so…>”

“<Heads! Yes!>” Hermann remembers why he’s there. “<I have so many things to ask you, Newt - >”

Newt is reaching around behind him to unclip the harness from his drift suit, and the gesture is similar enough to a hug. When Hermann feels the harness detach, Newt doesn’t move. Hermann sags into him. Apparently the cords were holding him up more than he thought.

“<Whoa, buddy,>” Newt says, and lowers him to the ground. “<To answer your first question, we’re in our Hunter. The one I named Treble Pythagoras. He’s how I visualize controlling my body - > mmf!”

Hermann finally manages to yank his helmet off and press his lips into Newt’s. Because they’re in each other’s heads, the drift sparks with memories and it feels like every kiss they’ve ever had: their first, the day the Breach closed; the last, both their faces both wet with tears; the ones in bed in their shared dorm; the ones in the back of Hong Kong restaurants; the ones tinged with exhaustion late in the lab; the ones with Newt talking the whole time.

With that skin to skin contact, everything finally turns drift blue and Hermann falls backwards through Newt’s mind. He feels Newt’s initial panic at learning what the Precursors were doing, feels him retreating into Hermann’s shared memories, exploring his subconscious, his despair. Him drifting with Alice—

_Alice?_

“Alice!” he gasps. “Siberia – there’s a breach up there! But it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen – “

“Your dating life is really depressing,” Newt says in response. The drift is always a two-way street, after all. “Wait, Alice? You know about Alice?”

They’re not anywhere specific; somewhere blue, or maybe somewhere with the green lighting of the Hong Kong Shatterdome. Hermann feels Newt rather than sees him. He feels his exhaustion, his elation…and his love. While being wrapped up in Newt’s emotions is incredibly anxiety-inducing, there’s a strong undercurrent of love running through it all. Hermann feels tears come to his eyes, whether in real life or mentally he’s not sure. Newt’s never stopped loving him either. That much is clear.

“The piece of the Kaiju brain you initially drifted with,” Hermann says. “The one currently residing in the base biology lab. Yes, I can see it now. That’s how the Precursors subjugated you.”

“Alice was more of a cell tower,” Newt corrects. “The real signal was coming from – “

“The breach in Siberia,” Hermann finishes. They’re in each other’s heads, there’s no way they wouldn’t end up finishing each other’s sentences at one point. “It’s not a physical breach. It’s…mental? Psychic?”

“I think of it as the Drift Breach, since that’s all that can get through.”

The two of them are silent for a few minutes, soaking up each other’s presence. Memories swirl past them and Hermann lets them go by without following them. There’s nowhere else he’d rather be than here.

Of course, it doesn’t last long. An otherworldly screeching cuts across their drift. Hermann can feel a multitude of malevolent presences nearby. The Precursors.

“Uh-oh, we woke up the neighbors,” Newt says. “I don’t know how we were able to hold them off for so long. They wanted to drift with you because they thought they could get in your head. Surprise, bitches! They’re even weaker than they thought. You should get out of here, Hermann.”

There’s not enough time to signal to Iolana. Hermann suddenly feels talons digging into his brain, and he cries out. He recognizes them from all the time they’ve talked to him. They have the same mental signature, the same brutality and erraticism. He can’t comprehend their thoughts. He just knows they want him.

There’s a wrenching, and Hermann is suddenly back in his body, on the floor and gasping. Iolana is kneeling above him, tossing the Pons aside. He looks up to see Amara pulling Newt’s Pons off. There’s something wet on his face. Hermann reaches up to wipe it away and realizes it’s blood dripping from his nose.

Iolana grimaces at him. “You started seizing. Are you okay?”

“<I’m fine,>” he says in Chinese. He blinks. “I – uh – yes. _Verdammt_ , I’m not – I – how long was I out?”

He’s disoriented, getting his languages mixed up. There’s no sign of any unwelcome guests in his mind. He doesn’t think they had enough time to get a hold on him. He has a hunch that Newt protected him somehow.

“About three minutes,” Iolana says. “How long did it feel like?”

“Around an hour,” Hermann murmurs. He looks at Newt again. He’s snarling at Amara. The Precursors, then. They look upset. If they’d gotten into his head, he supposes they would look triumphant. They’re not subtle.

“So, what did you find out?” Amara asks. She’s stepped quite a few paces away from Newt. Iolana looks at him expectantly, too.

“I think I have a job for you, Amara,” Hermann says. “Do you think you could get a vial of acid into the biology lab? There’s a piece of Kaiju that needs destroying.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Escape from Moyulan, part one

The Precursors are angry, and in their rage they take it out on Newt. They keep pulling him out of Hermann’s newly-gained memories, forcing him to feel what he can of his itchy, healing face and throbbing legs. The downside of them losing control is that Newt can feel his body more and more. It’s not in the state he’d imagined returning to. He’s about fifteen pounds off his healthy weight, besides the whole “injured from torture” problem. His mental studio apartment doesn’t feel like it used to. He’s more aware of his surroundings. Even so, he relishes the coldness of the cell concrete against his skin. Whatever he can create in his mind has nothing on this.

“If your so-called friends destroy the brain, we’ll still have power over you,” the Precursors hiss. Newt, reviewing a best-off clipshow of Iolana and Hermann’s friendship, just shouts,

“Shut up, I’m busy!”

He’s not worried about Hermann having a crush on Iolana or anything. Gay/lesbian solidarity and all that. They’ve had more contact than him and Hermann, though. No, no, it’s good Hermann had a friend to rely on. From the look of things he needed one.

“You strangled him,” the Precursors say. “He’ll be afraid of you.”

“Correction, _you_ strangled him,” Newt points out. He starts frantically rifling through Hermann’s most recent memories on the matter anyway.

“Wearing your face.”

From what Newt can tell, Hermann probably won’t want him to make any sudden movements even after they defeat the Precursors. And maybe no kissing for a while. That’s fine. Their mental kiss earlier was different. Newt needs to focus on himself for a little bit once all this is over. If it will ever be over.

Try as he might to convince himself, and as much as the Precursors snarled insidiously, all Hermann’s memories point to is love and compassion for Newt. It’s more than he deserves.

Will they ever be able to have a future together? Newt wants that as much as he wants the Precursors gone. From what he gathers from Hermann’s memories, neither of them are quite complete without the other. It’s their drift that binds them together. A part of Newt is inside Hermann, and vice versa. Only when united are they both complete.

When he put it like that, it sounds sappy as hell, but Newt doesn’t know how to function without Hermann. It’s like a phantom limb he keeps forgetting he’s lost, or a thread pulling at him from a great distance.

The day after their drift, Hermann shows up at what feels to Newt like the usual time. His internal clock is way off from not having seen the sun in over a week. Hermann sits down across from him, takes a deep breath, and hesitates. They have to be so careful now. They’re being monitored and if they give anything away, even in German, the whole plan might collapse. Then it’s off to Hong Kong, where Hermann’s dickish dad and more torture await.

“<How are you feeling today, Newt?>” Hermann finally settles on the most banal of topics. He’s barely looking at Newt, writing rapidly in his notebook. The Precursors are ten days without Alice, and, as a result, can’t even manage to translate the simplest of greetings.

“Speak English,” they growl.

“<No, I don’t think so.>”

Hermann finishes writing and subtly shifts his posture. Newt realizes he’s blocking the camera with his head. He turns his notebook towards Newt and holds it out.

_< The breakout will happen tonight. The cadets will sneak into the bio lab using my clearance and destroy the brain. Iolana and I will be down here, getting you to a shuttle. Amara and her girlfriend Vik will meet us on the airfield. Amara will help us break into the shuttle, and Iolana will fly us to Sydney.>_

Newt’s astonished at how easy it is to wrest control. In their panic, the Precursors are getting sloppy. He feels a flicker of something else at the back of his mind, something that feels like Hermann. Newt blinks, and he’s suddenly looking at himself, strapped to a chair with a grimy band shirt and swollen face. He blinks again, and he’s back in his own body. He and Hermann gasp at the same time. They ghost drifted.

“<They’re even weaker,>” Newt says, something true and not incriminating. “<I think they’ll be gone soon. If so, I figure they’ll be able to talk to me, not control me. All they’ll be is an annoying intrusive thought.>”

“<I’m glad,>” says Hermann. His leg bouncing up and down indicates that he is, in fact, rather distracted. Newt doesn’t think Hermann’s ever done anything this illegal before. A far cry from Newt’s college days, to be sure. He keeps feeling tendrils of their ghost drift and slaps them away. He can’t afford to have the Precursors take over Hermann, not now. That would just be like rain on your wedding day, wouldn’t it?

“<So before they go, _is_ there anything you can tell me about the Anteverse?>” Hermann asks. Newt can’t blame him. Whether the PPDC installs a highway through a Breach or not, it would be good to know if the Precursors are planning another attack.

Newt screws his face up. “<It would take a lot longer than ten years this time to get it done. They’re in shambles. Everything they’ve worked for is gone, and they’re rapidly losing control over their one link to this world. I only see glimpses of the Anteverse. From what I can tell, it seems like Raleigh and uh…and Mako did some real damage when they blew up the Danger. That’s why all of their efforts and resources were on this side. They had me build drones because they didn’t actually have that many kaiju manufactured on the other side. An atomic bomb will do that to you.>”

He trips over Mako’s name. The last time he remembers seeing her, it was a few weeks ago when he was conscious and they were arguing about something. Something important. She had been to Shao’s lab a few times in her job as Secretary General to try and persuade him to…what, come back to the PPDC? Newt suddenly realizes that this was probably why the Precursors killed her. She, like Hermann, was too much of an influence on Newt.

Newt forces himself not to slip into a memory of her, like a gag reflex. She’s in the lab, giggling about Newt teasing Hermann as Newt melts something with Kaiju Blue. Stay focused, Newt.

No, wait, how is he going to face Raleigh? And Tendo, and Herc, and everybody who worked with her and loved her? He has a feeling they won’t be as understanding as Hermann. They were always annoyed by him anyway, the weird bipolar scientist. He’ll need Hermann at his side to explain it to them.

“<Newton,>” Hermann says gently.

“Huh?”

“<You slipped away again,>” Hermann says. He smiles. “<You were thinking about Mako, weren’t you?>”

Newt shoots him a panicked look. _It didn’t bleed through the ghost drift, did it?_

“<I imagine you’ve been thinking about her a lot,>” Hermann says, with a tiny shake of his head at Newt’s expression. “<I miss her too. Oh, I called your family this morning to give them an update. They’d like to talk to you if they could.>”

“<I don’t think that’s a good idea,>” Newt says carefully. “<I might slip up and the Precursors could say something to scare them.>”

“<I think you should talk to them anyway,>” Hermann says. “<Before you go to Hong Kong.>”

There’s a knock at the door, and the two of them jump. Hermann looks worried; this has never happened during one of their sessions.

“Come in,” Hermann calls in English. To both of their surprise, Jake Pentecost walks in alone. He shuts the door behind him and slowly approaches Hermann’s chair. Newt realizes that he’s not afraid, he’s trying not to startle Newt.

“Is he, uh…?” the ranger asks Hermann.

“For now, yes,” Hermann says frostily. Newt can read his anger from here. Jake didn’t exactly step in to stop the torture, did he? Only after Hermann begged him did he show his misgivings. And Newt vaguely remembers Ranger Pentecost coming in to yell at Newt the day he was brought in here.

“I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” Jake says, surprise number two of the day.

“I – well, good.” Hermann sits back in his chair, almost disappointed he won’t get to argue with him. “For what? I could pick several.”

“All of it,” Jake says, hand rising to gesture at the room and then falling to his side. “Sorry about the PPDC interrogation guy, sorry this happened to Newt, sorry I couldn’t stop your dad from moving Newt to Hong Kong.”

“Yeah, fathers, huh?” Newt says with forced cheerfulness. “I know my dad is pretty worried about me right now.”

“You’re lucky, then,” Jake says absently. Newt thinks he missed his annoyance at everyone official overlooking his family, and Hermann having to contact them. The PPDC searched his apartment and found Alice, but couldn’t be bothered to talk to his next-of-kin?

“So will the Precursors put up much of a fight if we go to the Anteverse ourselves?” Jake asks Newt. Hermann stands up at that.

“I believe I was assigned to ask these questions, Ranger, even though it’s being taken out of my hands. I probably won’t ever see Newt again, could you please give us some privacy?”

Jake holds out his hands, regret written all over his face. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t – I was just trying to make conversation. I don’t actually know you all that well, Newt.” He looks from Newt to Hermann, who’s leaning righteously on his cane and looking down his nose as much as he can at somebody taller than him. “I know you two are close, so I wanted to…god, apologize? I don’t know. What happened to you is really shitty.”

“He knows we’re close, Hermann,” Newt says, rolling his eyes. “Wow, the rumor mill has been awfully kind these past ten years.”

Jake rubs his face. “Okay, yes, you dated. Sorry. You’re not the only ones who’ve been reunited with an ex in the last few days.”

Newt raises an eyebrow. “Oh? Oh. Ohhhhh.”

“Newt, quiet,” Hermann snaps. “You’ve said your apologies, Ranger. Was there anything else?”

Jake looks at the floor. “Nope,” he says. “Nope, that’s about it. You should probably come back with me, Dr. Gottlieb, I think Jules wanted you to sign off on the Jaeger repairs.” He catches Hermann’s expression and says, “I’ll wait outside, yeah?”

After he leaves, Newt says, “Don’t be so hard on him, Herm. Yeah, he’s working with a totalitarian government to start a war with some aliens, but – “ He frowns. “Where was I going with that?”

Hermann laughs. He leans over him and whispers in his ear, “See you tonight, _mein herz_.”

***

Newt spends a very uncomfortable next few hours. The Precursors are scrabbling around anxiously in his mind, like a dog running around a house during a thunderstorm. They can’t tell exactly what’s going to happen tonight – Newt is strong enough to keep that from them – except that it’s got something to do with Alice. After ten years, they still don’t really understand humans. That’s fair, because Newt doesn’t understand them either. Their brains are just too alien for him to comprehend. And they haven’t really made an effort to be understanding, either. Most of the time they were controlling his actions, they just put him on “human auto-pilot” with their own personal flavor of asshole. Newt can’t wait to get the taste of them out of his brain. He can’t wait to see the open sky as a (mostly) free man.

 As a manifestation of both the Precursors’ and his anxiety, Newt takes limping steps around the tiny cell. When that gets too tiring, he taps on his legs like a drum beat. Anything to get this manic energy out. Another thing he can’t wait to do: get back on his meds. He can guess he’s going to have to be on several new ones now as well.

 Finally, after Newt is aware for longer than he has been in years, a rattling noise comes down the hall and then stops at his door. There’s the beep of a card sliding, and Hermann comes in pushing a wheelchair. Even though he looks nervous, he gives Newt a crooked smile that would have made Newt weak-kneed if he were standing upright. Iolana is right behind Hermann. She puts a hand to her ear and says,

“Vik, Amara, Jinhai? We’re in. Go for Operation Brain Dissolve.”

At that, the Precursors go absolutely berserk. They overwhelm Newt like a giant wave drowning a hapless surfer. They dive for Hermann and fall short, crashing to the cement floor in a painful tangle of limbs. Iolana steps over him and drags him upright onto the bench.

“Stay back, Hermann,” she says over her shoulder. “I’ve got this – oof!”

His limbs akimbo, the Precursors knock Iolana in the face. She grabs a flailing arm and chains it to the ring. Newt can barely see through a mist of blue. He wonders if his eyes are glowing.

“ **Please!** ” the Precursors wheedle, in the hive voice they haven’t broken out in a while. “ **We’ll give you two anything. Would you like the rule the planet? Would you like to rule several planets? You, Gottlieb, you’ve always wanted to go to space. Come with us to space. Just call the children off. Don’t destroy the brain.** ”

Hermann blanches and looks away. Iolana steps back and puts a hand on his shoulder. Newt is glad he looked away. He doesn’t want anyone to see him like this. It’s a shameful loss of control. The Precursors pull and pull at the chain, chafing his wrists even more than they already are. They’re desperate. They have no idea what to do. In a few minutes, he’ll be free.

“It’s not empty?” Iolana suddenly says into her earpiece. “Someone’s working in there? Shit, they should’ve been gone this time of night. Uh – tell them – “

“Tell them you’re curious about the lab,” Hermann says. “Tell them you’re sorry for being in there.” The two of them wait. “Mm-hmm. Good. Now, while he’s distracted, Amara, go over and put the fluoroantimonic acid into the tube on the tank that I told you about.” A pause. “No, not that one!” Hermann says quickly. “That’ll flush it out. The one next to it. Yes, all of it. We don’t want to take any chances.” His eyes flick to Newt’s face.

“ **NO!** ” the Precursors bellow. They know exactly what’s going on. Their hold tightens in vain on Newt’s mind, their claws scrabbling as they lose control. They throw back Newt’s head and scream. He feels like he’s being torn apart, or turned inside out. He goes limp on the bench and starts to spasm. He’s dimly aware of Hermann suddenly at his side, Iolana hovering anxiously nearby. Hermann is holding his hand…

The Treble Pythagoras isn’t holding together very well. The Precursors are screaming next to Newt. He tries to detach himself and escape out the emergency hatch. As he lifts his arms, the Jaeger lifts one arm and falls to its knees. The Precursors try to stand up and there is the awful screeching of tearing metal. Sparks dance before Newt’s eyes, both real and in his retinas.

WARNING: BRAIN CALIBRATION AT 5%! The HUD warns. Disoriented, Newt tries to stand up again. The Jaeger teeters dangerously and topples over. It seems to fall for forever. When the motion finally stops, Newt is lying tangled in wires and broken Jaeger parts, his legs trapped beneath a jagged piece of metal. He blinks and looks around. Something blue flickers nearby in the outline of the Precursors – and then it’s gone.

***

The first thing Newt registers is that he’s in a lot of pain. Did he get in a fight with some skinheads again?

The second thing he registers is two people speaking rather close to him.

“Okay, they’re out,” a nearby female voice says. “Jinhai will probably get in trouble in the morning.”

“Newt,” says a loving voice right in his ear. “Newton, come back to me.”

The third thing he registers is that he’s being held by someone. He lifts one arm to hug them back. The other one is restrained somehow. He wraps his free arm around them anyway. This feels good. Safe.

He opens his eyes and looks into a familiar face.

“Hermann?” he says in wonder.

“Newt,” Hermann says, his voice breaking. “Is it really you?”

“I – yeah.” He grins and sits up. Hermann sits back on the bench a little, still close enough to be touching his knee and holding his free hand. “Yeah, it’s me. They’re gone. I can barely hear them – they’re too far away.”

“Prove it,” Iolana says. She’s standing over them with her arms folded.

“Ah, I’ve got this one.” Hermann clears his throat. “Newt, I eventually watched the Star Wars prequels and I don’t know what all the fuss is about. The midichlorians make perfect sense if you think about it. There doesn’t need to be a lot of complicated science, it’s a space opera.”

“You’re the last person I’d expect to say that, Herm!” Newt bursts out. He can’t help himself – it’s a reflex. “A space opera is when science needs to make the most sense. And they just didn’t want to figure out what happened to Anakin’s dad so they wrote in some virgin birth bullshit—”

“That’s him,” Hermann sighs happily.

“I figured,” Iolana says drily. “Can we go, though? Vik and Amara are going to beat us to the airfield.”

They help Newt into the wheelchair and strap him in. It’s got a neat little seatbelt. Newt can’t get a huge silly grin off his face. The air – it tastes beautifully stale! And he didn’t realize how bad his vision was while the Precursors were in his brain. Actually, he still can’t see all that well. His smile dips for a moment. He’s going to need to find some glasses.

“What’s the cuisine like in Australia, Herms?” he babbles. “Do you think they’ll have kangaroo to try? And they have lots of great beer there, right? Doesn’t Sydney have great seafood?”

“I’m sure you’ll be able to try it all, _schatzi_.” Hermann kisses the top of his forehead and starts to wheel him towards the door. They’re in the elevator without a hitch. Newt can see that Iolana and Hermann left some bags in here. The entire contents of someone’s room, of someone’s life, distilled down to a duffle bag.

“You’re giving everything up for me,” he realizes.

“Don’t flatter yourself, Dr. Geiszler,” Iolana says as she punches the button for top floor, airfield. “This is a convenient way for me to leave the PPDC.”

“That’s Iolana’s version of teasing,” Hermann says. He puts both hands on Newt’s shoulders, a warmth that Newt can feel. “She’s helped me more than I can say.”

“I don’t know which one of you orchestrated this plan,” Newt says. “So far it seems to be going pretty – “

He’s drowned out by the ear-splitting sound of a siren.

“They caught us!” Hermann yells.

“Not yet they haven’t,” Iolana says grimly. She gets behind Newt’s chair and braces herself. “They won’t have time to shut this elevator down. When it opens, we need to be ready to _run_.”

“Iolana, I can’t run!” Hermann shouts over the siren.

“Do your best!” Iolana shouts back.

The elevator door dings. “Sixth floor. Airfield,” says a canned voice.

A dark space lit by a paltry few floodlights opens up before them. Above are the stars, and ahead are the dark shapes of dormant ships and even a few hulking Jaeger parts.

“Go!” Iolana shouts, and they’re off.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Escape from Moyulan, part two! And some exciting reunions...

Despite what Iolana said, she is going slow enough that Hermann can keep up without feeling like his leg is going to fall off. He finds that if he leans on Newt’s wheelchair, it will take his weight enough that he can skip along on his good leg.

“Where is it, where is it – ?” Iolana’s muttering under her breath. Everything looks different in the dark. Jaeger parts that he designed, shuttlecraft, and airplanes all look unfamiliar and threatening in the dark. Any of them could have a squad of guards hiding behind them.

Suddenly, Hermann spots motion and snaps his head around to look. Vik is waving a cell phone’s flashlight at them in front of a large shuttlecraft.

“There!” Hermann pants. Iolana turns the wheelchair a full ninety degrees and corrects course towards Vik and – yes, and Amara, kneeling at the shuttle’s door.

“Whoa,” Newt mutters. “Good thing you strapped me in.”

“Quit your whining,” Iolana gasps. She jolts to a stop, throwing Hermann forward onto Newt’s shoulders and sending his cane, hooked to the back of the wheelchair, skidding across the concourse. He retrieves it and then greets Vik and Amara.

“We weren’t sure you were coming to Sydney,” he says to Vik. She’s got her arms folded and is chewing her lip. She keeps glancing down at Amara and then across the airstrip.

“Had to keep an eye on shortstuff,” she says. She doesn’t sound too happy about her decision. “Giving up position as cadet, sure, all for girlfriend. The things we do for love.”

“She just likes to complain,” Amara says. She’s got a mini blowtorch in her hand and a bandana around her mouth and nose in a flimsy attempt to protect her face from sparks. “Almost there.”

Iolana and Hermann look up at the shuttle, designed for ferrying soldiers to neighboring parts of China.

"Did you have to choose one this big?” Iolana asks doubtfully. “It’ll be difficult to fly.”

“This was the only one I knew how to break into,” Amara says distantly.

Hermann turns to Newt, who has his eyes closed and looks to be enjoying the feeling of wind on his face. Hermann almost doesn’t want to disturb him. He says softly,

“Newt?” and Newt instantly opens his eyes. “This is Vik and Amara, the rest of our little escape group.”

“Vik Malikova,” she introduces herself. “Yes, I am related to Kaidonovskys. Yes, I know you worked with them. And you are basement dweller.”

“Not the first time I’ve been called that,” Newt winces. He looks around, enjoying the night air again. “I think I want to live in the woods for the rest of my life.”

“That might be the only way to keep you out of trouble,” Hermann mutters. Newt laughs and reaches out to squeeze his hand.

"Okay, got it!” Amara says excitedly. The shuttle door hisses with decompressing air and slowly slides open. Amara bounds inside, closely followed by Vik. Iolana checks over her shoulder as she helps Hermann lift Newt’s wheelchair into the shuttle.

“Not really known for accessibility at the PPDC, are we?” Newt says.

"You will not _believe_ the fuss I kicked up – “ Hermann grunts.

“I think I would,” Newt says with fondness as he’s set down inside the shuttle.

“Less chat!” Iolana calls. She bounds into the cockpit, leaving Hermann to unload their duffle bags from Newt’s lap. Amara is talking about hotwiring the shuttle’s systems to get it going. Even as she says it, the engines kick on and so do the interior lights.

“There goes our position!” Vik calls. “And – yep, here they come!”

“Aw, shit,” says Newt.

Hermann turns away from Newt to look past Vik out the door. More floodlights are kicking on, and running across the airfield towards them are more than one squadron of soldiers, their guns out but not aimed yet. Hermann recognizes Jake and Nate leading them.

“Iolana, get us skyward!” he yells.

“Yeah, duh!” she shouts back. The engines whir into a higher gear, and the shuttlecraft slowly lifts off the ground. The soldiers are getting closer now. Vik hits the door button and it starts to slide close. Ranger Lambert is close enough to see Hermann, and there’s a grim look of disappointment. Hermann can see him giving orders to the squadrons. They raise their gun and take aim at Newt through the open door. There’s no time to haul the door the rest of the way shut. Without thinking, Hermann throws himself across the defenseless Newt’s lap. A split-second later, shots fire, one of them hitting Hermann in the back. He cries out and Newt’s eyes go wide. Their faces are so close together.

“Shit, Hermann, are you okay?” Newt yells. There’s no doubt that it’s really him. Hermann tries to speak and blood bubbles out of his mouth. Newt grabs him, trying to keep him upright, hindered by the strap at his waist. Hermann smiles. He wants to tell Newt that he’s okay, but his chest is burning and his vision is starting to swim.

“Vik! Amara! Somebody help!” Newt screams.

More shots ring out and ping off the side of the shuttle as it flies out of range. There’s the distant shout of Jake’s voice ordering them to cease fire. Hermann just stares into Newt’s wild eyes. It’s him, it’s really him. He’s free.

“Somebody get to Hermann!” Iolana yells from the cockpit. Hermann slides off Newt and to the floor. Hands grab him, and then he falls unconscious.

***

Something cold tickles Hermann’s nose. He tries to rub it and hits plastic over his mouth. A cool hand grabs his.

“Leave that, Dr. Gottlieb, you need it to breathe.”

Hermann’s pretty sure he’s not in heaven. His back and leg are aching and it's difficult to breathe. He didn’t imagine heaven being this painful. Then he opens his eyes and that theory is blown out of the water. Sitting next to him is PPDC Secretary General Mako Mori.

“Mako!” he croaks. His words are muffled by the oxygen mask he’s wearing. There’s no way he’ll be able to sit up, even though he wants to jump out of bed. Mako’s alive, and not only that, looks unscathed.

“Your helicopter—” Hermann gasps. “It went down, Jake saw, we—we had a memorial—”

Mako rolls her eyes affectionately. “Jake hasn’t been around me in a few years. He must have forgotten how hard I am to kill. Then we knew the attacks were coming from the inside, and it seemed better to stay dead for a while.” She pats his shoulder. “I’ll give you the details of my harrowing escape later. It’s yours that I’m concerned about right now. The bullet entered your lung, and Dr. Kahale was able to put you on emergency oxygen until you arrived in Sydney. You’re in the Shatterdome now.”

“And Newt?” Hermann whispers.

“He’s _fine_ , Hermann. We’ve got him under observation. Hush and worry about yourself for a few minutes. The doctors were able to remove the bullet. You’re very lucky, you could have had lead poisoning for the rest of your life. You should be up and walking in the next few days.”

“That’s great, but Newton – do they know he’s better now – they can’t hurt him, please, Mako.”

She puts her hand over his and looks him dead in the eye. “Hermann, I give you my word as former Secretary General that no harm will come to Newt. He’s severely malnourished and has been off his medication for many years. The doctors here are mostly looking after his physical and mental health. The best psychiatrist in Australia is talking to him right now.” She looks down. “It’s going to be hard, for him and for all of us. For the last few years, he was very much…not himself.” She looks up. “Rest assured, Hermann, I’m glad to see his real self back. The difference is remarkable.” She stands up and stretches. “And he didn’t actual kill me, so I think I’ll forgive him. I’ve been in here to give Dr. Kahale and the cadets a break. They’ll want to know you’re awake.”

She leaves and calls some nurses over, and there’s a flurry for a few minutes while Hermann’s chest and back are examined, a fresh oxygen tank is switched in, and more painkillers are put in his IV. It’s in a bit of a medicated fog that he receives Amara and Iolana.

“Hermann!” Amara squeals, and runs to him. She stops herself just before she hugs him and instead places a kiss on his cheek right next to his mask. “We were so worried about you! I thought you were dead for sure. A bullet right through your lung? The doctors here are amazing!”

“And _I_ kept telling you, it’s a routine procedure.” Iolana mouths the words _teen angst_ at Hermann. She takes his hand and smiles fondly. “Yes, I was worried, too. When the soldiers were shooting at us I was worried they’d take us down, so I burned up a lot of our fuel just getting out of Moyulan. We had to limp our way over to Sydney. Turns out, the shuttles are actually built to withstand bullet fire, so I needn’t have worried. What was worrying was getting you to Sydney in time to save you. Luckily it only took an hour or so.”

The strides that transportation technology have made in the last few years is incredible. Being constantly on the alert for war will do that to a world’s industries.

“Thank you,” Hermann croaks. “For everything.” He shifts in bed and clutches Iolana’s hand, grateful for once for the contact. He wishes it were Newt’s hand. “Any word from Moyulan? Are we traitors, fired from our positions?”

“One of the first things I did on the shuttle was take its tracking technology offline,” says Amara proudly. “They don’t know where we went.” Her face falls. “The only wrench in our plan is Jake.”

“Jake? I thought he’d be on our side, a little bit…” says Hermann. He remembers hearing Jake ordering the soldiers to cease firing once he’d been hit.

“I mean he might be able to find out where we are. Through me.” Amara taps her head, and Hermann remembers with a jolt that she and Ranger Pentecost were drift partners. “We’re not super compatible, so all I really get from him is emotions. He’s angry. I’ve been trying to keep him tamped down when he reaches out to me. I want him, everyone, out of my head. I’m gonna talk to a drift expert here and see if they can do that.”

Hermann sighs. “I would be very surprised if they could, even twenty-one years into the research. The only reason anyone would want to, up until this point, would be to erase memories of drifting with someone who died while piloting. And even then, they’d still want a connection with their partner.”

“Fine,” says Amara, her face tightening. “I’ll just invent a technique myself, then.”

Hermann laughs weakly, painfully. “You can’t study every field, Amara. Concentrate on one.”

“Like you?” Amara challenges. “Don’t you study Kaiju now too?”

“Hrm,” says Hermann, and Iolana laughs.

“She’s got you there, Hermann. Back to our current situation. Marshal Hansen has been trying to keep this Shatterdome’s rebellion a secret. Hence the encryption and hiding of Sec-Gen Mori. Even though we’ve only been here for a few hours, I can tell that everyone in this ‘dome is just as frustrated with the PPDC as we are. Mori doesn’t have enough influence to sway everyone.”

“She should just talk to Jake,” Hermann says. It seems so obvious. “It’s his idea to go to the Anteverse—”

“Yes, his idea that the PPDC signed off on and are backing with billions of dollars. That train has left the station, Hermann.” Iolana then looks smug. “Luckily, your friendly neighborhood lesbian has a bit of influence with the Moyulan Shatterdome’s top engineer.”

Amara and Hermann both stare at her.

“What did you ask Liwen Shao to do?” Hermann asks suspiciously. Did Iolana really have that much influence on Liwen within just a few days of knowing her?

“I just asked her if she’d be on our side if it came to stopping the PPDC,” says Iolana casually. She quickly drops her act and sighs. “I don’t know if we can actually count on her. Among our scientist allies, she’s the one with the most power. She said she’d try and install a kill switch on all the ships they make for the Anteverse mission. She’ll be the only one with access to it. If worst comes to worst, she can try and ground the ships before the mission gets started.”

“That would be – ideal,” says Hermann, shocked. “Iolana, this could be the answer to our problems.”

“If she goes through with it,” corrects Iolana. “And that’s a pretty big if. You talked to her, Hermann, how likely do you think it is she’s going to sacrifice her standing and probably get thrown in jail?”

“She agreed to split up her company,” Hermann points out.

“Yes, to help the PPDC.” Iolana lets go of his hand and starts to pace. Amara is slumped in the chair that Mako vacated. She throws her head back.

“Ugh. Politics. Boring! Can we go back to talking about gay shit?” She presses her hands together and points them at Hermann. “Hermann. I tried to get them to let Newt come in and see you. He’s still undergoing psych evaluation. The nurses and I have been giving him regular updates about you. He was really freaking out. About you, about…everything, generally.” She puts her hands to her lips and frowns. “I think he’s gonna be okay. He’s a cool guy. It’s weird, though.”

“Weird how?” Hermann asks. He only wants Newt to be okay, to be back to normal. To enjoy life and be thriving. He wishes he could have been there for Newt’s first meal. There’ll be time for that later, time for him to enjoy non-Shatterdome food.

“I don’t think the Precursors are fully leaving him alone,” says Amara. She quickly clarifies when Hermann’s eyes go wide, “They can’t control him anymore. I think they talk to him, though. At least – he talks to them. And he stares off into space _all the time_. Anyway. He’ll probably be better when he sees you.”

“It’s best that he’s been talking to a psychiatrist. He needs to center himself.” A pained look briefly flashes across Hermann’s face. “I do wish I could see him, though.”

At those words, the door to Hermann’s hospital room open and Tendo Choi bounds in, followed by Ranger Raleigh Beckett. Both are looking their ten extra years. The lines that were always on Tendo’s face have deepened, and Ranger Beckett’s puppy-dog face has become drawn into more of a scruffy hunting dog look. He’s sporting a trimmed blonde beard.

“Hermann the man!” Tendo crows, ignoring Iolana and Amara to rush to Hermann’s bedside. “Glad you got my message. Holy shit, I thought if someone was gonna get hurt on the way outta Moyulan, it was gonna be Newt. And your asshole dad is back in power? I can tell you one thing – Lars Gottlieb does not have many fans down under.”

“Don’t overwhelm him, Tendo,” Raleigh says. He nods to Hermann, much more restrained. Hermann has always appreciated the ranger’s tact. Raleigh was not one of the people he expected to see again. They’d only worked together for a few days before they all went their separate ways post-Breach. He’s thought of the man often over the last few years, especially whenever Ranger Lambert was around. Now that Hermann is in the presence of the definite article, he again finds himself drawn to Raleigh’s quiet charm.

“We should leave you to it, it’s getting a little crowded in here,” Iolana says. She’s clearly annoyed at having her visiting time interrupted by these big, loud war heroes. Amara doesn’t seem to mind. She’s staring at Tendo and Raleigh with what can only be described as googly eyes.

“Amara,” Hermann says, and she snaps her gaze towards him. “Never meet your heroes. They might convince you to desert your post and go on the run.”

She smiles and mock salutes. “People might say you kidnapped me. We’ll visit later, Hermann.”

Iolana all but drags her out. After they’re gone, Tendo shakes his hand. Hermann can tell in his excited buzz that he wouldn’t mind going in for a hug, but is respecting boundaries. Hermann’s glad of that. There’s a bit too much fussing over him today, and he’s still recovering from a hole in his lung. He’ll need a long nap when this is all over.

“So, they dragged you out of retirement,” he says to Tendo.

“I didn’t take much convincing. It was right around the time they started using Jaegers as police weapons during protestors,” says Tendo darkly. Hermann remembers that: the Christmas Eve Massacre, they call it. It was one of the few news stories from America to get through to him in the last few years. It was pretty hard to forget. Fewer than a hundred people had gathered outside the house of a wealthy politician who, rumor had it, was being bought by the PPDC to support giving them more power in congress. The crowd wasn’t even protesting that; they were protesting the large banquet that the politician was putting on for the holiday. In some rural parts of the Midwest, where coastal refugees had wound up, per-person rationing was still in effect. It was a mystery to no one how the politician’s four-person household was able to put on such an elaborate dinner party. The crowd escalated via social media, and the politician panicked and called one of his PPDC friends. Half an hour later, security (and Dr. Hermann Gottlieb-designed) Jaeger Chrome Oracle was deployed to deal with the protesters. When the mud and snow had settled, four people were dead and thirteen wounded.

Hermann had never approved of Jaegers working security, police-related or not. After that, he had stayed on with the PPDC as…what? In the foolish hope that he could be some kind of check-and-balance? That hadn’t worked out very well.

Raleigh sees his face and must guess what’s going through his head. “Hey, don’t blame yourself, Dr. Gottlieb,” he says softly. “We’ve all done things for the PPDC we’re not proud of. Who knew they’d go from saving the world to ruling it? Mako’s in the same moral position. She thought she’d be able to stop them from within. None of them listened to her.”

He looks so sad that Hermann is about to offer his condolences before remembering that Mako Mori is alive again. Despite all of the bad things going on in the world, it still feels like Hermann had been shot and gone to a heaven where Newton is free of the Precursors and Mako Mori is alive.

“Thank you both for coming to see me,” he says. He looks at the two of them and grasps Tendo’s forearm, to the J-Tech’s surprise. “And thank you for being the resistance. Again,” he adds wryly, and Tendo and Raleigh laugh. “I’m so glad we’re all together. The Hong Kong Shatterdome was long due a reunion, what’s left of us.”

“Ah, speaking of which, Herc – or should I say, Marshall Hansen – wants to see you when you’re well enough,” says Tendo. Hermann nearly levers himself out of bed, and is suddenly short of both breath and oxygen tube.

“I should go and see him now!” he cries, and Raleigh pushes him back into bed with enough force that he collapses onto the pillows.

“No,” the ranger says sternly. “He said when you’re well enough, and you’re not. You don’t want to be wasting the marshal’s time when you walk into the LOCCENT and then collapse.”

“I should get back to the LOCCENT, actually,” Tendo says with reluctance. He claps his hands together a few times. “I’ll be back, Hermann. We gotta start planning our Siberia mission.”

He leaves without explaining that, so Hermann turns to Ranger Beckett. He’s not really sure why the man stayed.

“We’re going to Sibera?”

“To close that drift the Precursors used to exploit your partner,” Raleigh says. Hermann appreciates the polite use of the word “partner”. It encompasses so many things: Drift partner, life partner, lab partner…It’s probably a word that Raleigh’s come to use over the years to describe his and Mako’s relationship to enquiring minds. Raleigh cracks a smile. “Hey, I like the cadets you brought. A little young, aren’t they?”

“You have no idea,” Hermann says fervently. “I’ve been so out of touch – are they recruiting cadets that young at every Shatterdome?”

“Some younger,” Raleigh sighs. “I only wish Mako and I had more influence. Starting training young is one thing. Using cadets that young as pilots is another altogether. If my brother and I had piloted the Danger at age eighteen, our minds would’ve snapped. Some drift scientists think you shouldn’t even do a _simulation_ until age twenty-five when the—”

“Prefrontal cortex is fully developed,” Hermann finishes. “You’ve read Dr. Miller’s Drift study then, too?”

“Well,” says Raleigh, “the digest.”

Hermann grins and ducks his head to hide it. It feels so good to be back, and he knows this feeling will be one hundred times better with Newton.

“I did wanna warn you, though,” says Raleigh seriously, “Mako might not’ve said, seeing as how she knows you and all.”

Hermann looks up now, stomach twisting. Raleigh is looking at him levelly.

“I’m not gonna hurt Dr. Geiszler or anything, I promise. I’m just gonna be a little wary around him until we close this Breach. Then I’ll make an effort to like the guy. Capeesh?”

Hermann relaxes. “That’s perfectly natural, Ranger,” he says. “I don’t blame you. We should all be a tad careful around Newton, especially since he’s been through so much trauma. I honestly don’t know how much influence the Precursors still have. And if they manage to get ahold of him again – heaven forbid – I’ll want a strong, understanding ranger around so he doesn’t hurt himself.”

Raleigh nods once, and stands up. “Get better soon. I think we all need you for this Siberia plan.”

Now that Hermann is alone with his thoughts for the first time since he woke up, he can take it all in, including the aches and pains he’s been ignoring. Mako Mori alive, a bullet removed from his chest, Tendo and Raleigh, Iolana’s alliance with Liwen Shao. It’s been a long hour since Hermann woke up. All he wants is Newton. He doesn’t care what’s inside Newt, or who could be influencing him anymore. He just wants Newt lying beside him. Maybe even fussing over his bullet wound a little.

In lieu of that, Hermann turns up the painkiller drip through his IV and settles down for some well-earned rest.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After spending some time in the hospital, Newt and Hermann learn about the plan to close the Breach in Siberia.

They don’t let Newt see Hermann at first. And that’s understandable -  he hasn’t been allowed to leave his room just off the medbay since he got to the Sydney Shatterdome. Even though the staff are sympathetic (they had to have been briefed on him), and even though the Precursors are but a crowd shouting from a long ways away, all he can think about is Hermann. Hermann bleeding on his lap, staring at him with vacant eyes as blood dripped down his chin. Hermann’s face obscured by an oxygen mask, going pale even as Amara and Vik held wads of gauze to his chest. Newt needs to replace that image with the healthy Hermann that the nurses tell him is only a few rooms away.

Newt’s gained a predilection for staring off into space. He forgets he’s in control of his body, and not trapped in his own head. Then he’ll remember, get up, and go pacing around the room with a cane to match Hermann’s. His physical therapist at least approves of that. He’s got a whole team of people looking over him now: dietician, physical therapist, psychiatrist, and security guard. The guard, Arthur, actually isn’t too bad. He’s an affable Australian who’s been updating Newt on all the pop culture and news he missed in the last nine years.  Besides the guard, there’s no obvious sign that they’re afraid of him. Newt wouldn’t blame them if they were. Still, everyone is nice, and he’s never been a threatening-looking guy. The psychiatrist is actually working wonders.

She comes into his room now, looking apologetic. He puts his tablet aside. The anime show Arthur recommended isn’t that good.

“Hi, doc,” he greets her. Dr. Tracy Denham is her name, and she has gray hair and the dirtiest laugh Newt’s ever heard.

“Hi, doc,” she replies. “I know we decided on 3 pm for today’s appointment, but there’s someone who wants to see you and I wanted to check with you before I let them in.”

“Is it Hermann?” Newt asks, trying to stand up.

“It’s not, I’m sorry,” says Dr. Denham, looking genuinely pained. “The nurses are keeping me up to date, so he should be mobile by tomorrow.”

“Can you ask Priya if I can have sushi with him tomorrow, then?” His dietician approves everything he eats: lots of fresh, hearty meals. She tried putting him on protein shakes at first, which made him throw up. He vaguely remembers the Precursors feeding him a lot of protein shakes. All food he eats now is good, because it’s food he can taste. He still wants to have a fancy meal with Hermann, though.

“Maybe not sushi yet,” says Dr. Denham. “I don’t know what kind of food Hermann can have.”

“Good point,” sighs Newt. “So who are the visitors?”

“Mako Mori and Raleigh Becket.”

Dr. Denham watches him closely to gauge his reaction. He sits down on the bed in surprise. He’d been happier when he saw her running towards their landing shuttle than he had been when the Precursors left. In all the confusion of their arrival, he hadn’t gotten to talk to her much. She looked perfectly fine, except for a few scrapes on her face.

“They – they _want_ to see me?” he confirms. “The marshal hasn’t, like, forced them or anything?”

Dr. Denham checks her tablet. “Not that I’m aware of. They put in a request to see you.” She watches the gamut of emotions chasing their way across his face: shock, apprehension, shame. “Do you want Arthur in here with you?”

“No,” he choke-laughs. “No, I don’t need a guard. Unless it’s for their sake.”

“Newt,” she says sternly. “We talked about this. You haven’t shown any signs of Precursor influence. We’ve done a brain scan every day. Do you want to hurt Mako?”

“No!” he exclaims.

“Then you’ll be fine. I’m not saying you’ll emerge emotionally unscathed. That’s why I’m asking you: do you want to see them?”

Yes, almost as much as he wants to see Hermann. Also: no, he can’t face Mako. And Ranger Becket? The jock he’d only known for a few days?

“Can it just be Mako?” he whispers.

Dr. Denham shoots off a quick message on her tablet. Immediately, she gets a reply and frowns at it.

“What?” Newt asks.

Dr. Denham holds up a finger and types out her reply. That gets her an answer she seems satisfied with, and she goes to the door and opens it. Newt realizes what she’s doing and yells,

“They’re right outside?!”

Dr. Denham stands aside to let Mako Mori in. She’s not wearing her uniform – Sydney isn’t very formal. To compound Newt’s surprise, she’s smiling faintly.

“I’ll be waiting out here with Raleigh,” Dr. Denham calls to Newt, and she shuts the door behind her.

“Newt,” Mako says as she rushes to him. Without hesitation, she gives him a big hug. Newt melts into it. It’s the first hug he’s had in…what, years? He grabs the back of her coat and sobs into her shoulder.

“Jesus, Mako, I—I’m so sorry—”

 “No, no, shh.” She rubs his back and lets him cry. “I let you down, Newt. All those times I saw you and didn’t question what was going on with you. It was clear there was something wrong. I was so mad at you for working with Shao that I just ignored it. I’m so sorry what happened to you.”

“Don’t apologize to me. I killed people,” he sobs. He can already feel the wet spot he’s creating on her shoulder. “You’re fine, but all those people in Tokyo – the people at Moyulan, I—"

“It could have been so much worse,” Mako whispers. “Jake and Hermann stopped them. It wasn’t you. It’s all right.”

 _It wasn’t you. It was the Precursors. It wasn’t you_. He’s got so many voices in his head saying that: Hermann’s, Dr. Denham’s, and now Mako’s. They’re eroding the blame that the Precursors placed on him, that he placed on himself.

Mako finally pulls back and steers him towards the bed. They both sit down, which is good, because Newt felt like he was going to collapse into Mako. His legs have giant bruises on them that won’t heal for another few weeks. Mako looks at him with her kind, searching eyes, and tousles his hair.

“How did you escape the helicopter?” he asks. “And how did you know about Siberia? I barely knew what was going on.”

“In answer to your first question, a parachute,” she says with a wink. “The pilot too. And Siberia was a little trickier. I triangulated where Obsidian Fury came from based on some research I’d been doing on the drones you and Shao were building.”

“You’ve got it on lockdown,” Newt says. “Finally, an authority figure I can look up to. You’re not planning on becoming marshal of this dome any time soon, are you?”

“This is bigger than you know, Newt,” she says, suddenly serious. “If our plan goes right, there won’t be any shatterdomes after this because there won’t be a PPDC.”

“Uh,” Newt gapes. “Good? Sounds like you’ve got a lot going on. What about the drift Breach in Siberia? Got a plan to close that?”

“That’s where the skills of a genius scientist come in.” She’s playful again. “I’m putting you, Hermann, and Dr. Kahale on the case once you all are better. Dr. Kahale’s already been working on it. We need your memories of the Breach itself, though.”

Newt doesn’t really hear anything besides Hermann’s name.

“About Hermann,” he says. “Can you get me to see him? You’re kinda in charge, right?”

Mako hesitates for only a split second before saying, “Yes, I am. Come on.”

It’s like when she was little and they were both in Alaska, sliding around clean floors in their socks or watching anime. Mako was the only person Newt could really goof around with, and vice versa. She was always a solemn child. Except around Newt. Newt could get her to open up like no one else. Of course, that meant she would get more annoyed by him than anyone. She understood him and his potential like Hermann did. On his bad days, she would encourage him to be the best he could.

Mako goes to a door Newt had thought was for a closet and swipes her card key. It opens to a small office with a window, and that window looks out into a large medbay. They wait for a nurse to go by and then slip through the row of beds to another door. This one Mako knocks at. A muffled voice on the other side says

“Come in,”

And Mako flings it dramatically open to reveal the private hospital room of one Dr. Hermann Gottlieb.

“Hermann!” Newt rushes to his hospital bed, tossing his cane to the floor and kneeling down. He grabs for Hermann’s hands. Hermann is looking at him, pale and bewildered. A small oxygen tube is snaking from his nose.

“Mako, did you arrange this? He’s not supposed to be in here.”

“Is that all you can say?” Newt clutches his hands like Rose clutching to that piece of wood in _Titanic_. “ _Mein herz, schatz,_ Gottliebling, light of my life, my savior. You literally took a bullet for me. You’ve figuratively taken many bullets for me. How’m I supposed to pay you back for all this?”

Hermann’s smile crinkles the corners of his eyes. He cups Newt’s face with his hand.

“Get better, for me. And for yourself. I’m feeling fine. Soon I’ll be up and visiting you. I can’t do that if you get caught.”

Newt shrugs. “Eh, Mako will bail me out. I _had_ to come see you, Herm. I could feel how close your thoughts were. You need to stop taking so many drugs. You’re making me sluggish.”

Hermann sticks a thumb over his shoulder. “I got shot, Newton. I’m in a lot of pain. And you pacing around your room isn’t helping.” He looks past Newt at Mako. “While you’re both here, though, what’s the plan to close the Breach in Siberia? We still don’t know how to even go through it, let alone explode it shut like we did the last one.”

Mako comes forward and pulls out her phone. “Dr. Kahale’s been doing lots of research in the last few days. We gave her some data she didn’t have access to, which I think has led to a big breakthrough. I’ll send you her findings so you have something to look at.”

Newt rolls his eyes. “It’s probably gonna involve us drifting again. And me talking to the Precursors or something.”

Hermann’s eyes shoot to his face. “They’re not—”

“Nah, I can barely hear ‘em,” Newt says. “I’ve dealt with louder intrusive thoughts. I can try and tune into them more, see if they tell me anything.”

Mako puts a hand on his shoulder. “Talk to Dr. Denham about it. It’s only if you feel you can do it.”

“As far as I know, there’s really no way for them to get to me without me drifting with a kaiju brain again,” Newt says. “They’re wayyyy too far away for that kind of control. When we get closer to Siberia, though…” He shifts his weight on his painful legs. It’s an uncomfortable thought. “Yeah, I dunno.”

Hermann bumps his forehead to Newt’s. “<You’re so brave, my love. We’re so close to the end.>”

Newt’s still scared of kissing Hermann, despite what he said about the Precursors, so he just stares at Hermann’s eyes and then his lips and says, “Mm-hmm,” a little breathlessly.

“<Have you called your family? They’ll want to hear from you.>”

An icy fist suddenly grabs Newt’s stomach. “<I can’t – I don’t want to – Can’t you just let them know?>”

“<All right,>” Hermann sighs reluctantly. “<You’re going to have to talk to them eventually.>”

“Time to go,” Mako says regretfully, tugging at Newt’s shoulder again. “You can see each other tomorrow, I promise.”

“<Get better,>” Newt says to Hermann as he raises himself up on aching legs. “<For me.>”

Hermann smiles his crooked smile. “<I’ll be in the LOCCENT to plan tomorrow even if I have to be the one in the wheelchair this time.>”

Newt pulls his hands away until they’re touching pinkies. “<No more getting ourselves hurt. Pinky promise?>”

Bewildered, Hermann pulls at his pinky several times until getting it in the right position and then shakes it. Newt laughs and leaves before Mako has to drag him away. He’s got to get out now, or he’ll stay in there and they’ll have to remove him with a forklift. As he and Mako slip back across the rooms separating him and Hermann, she mutters in German,

“<You know I can understand you, right?>”

Newt flushes. “Shoot, I kinda forgot that. It’s been a while. Stop being such a genius and good at everything, Mako. I thought I had that market cornered.”

She smacks the back of his head. “Not funny.”

“Ow! Don’t hit a wounded man!”

Newt can tell, from their easy banter, that all is forgiven. All of it: the years of cold shoulder, the being possessed, the trying-to-kill-her thing. And if Mako can forgive him, then maybe there’s hope yet.

***

Per Mako’s promise, the next afternoon Arthur comes into Newt’s room and announces,

"All right, mate. You’ve got LOCCENT clearance.”

Newt can’t jump up, so instead he levers himself off the bed as quickly as possible. “And Hermann too?”

Arthur smiles. “Yes, and Dr. Gottlieb as well. He’s just outside. We thought you might wanna walk with him over there.”

“Would I ever!” Newt exclaims. “Are you coming with me to the LOCCENT?”

He heads for the door, Arthur’s comforting bulk close behind.

“Yes, though only to the door. My security clearance ends after that. They keep the list of people with clearance pretty short. My guess is they do lots of super-secret planning in there.”

“You’re probably not wrong,” Newt agrees. He consents to let Arthur hold the door open for him and walks out into the corridor to see Hermann, sitting in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank. He gives Newt a crooked smile beneath the tubes in his nose.

“Working together again, _schatzi_. How does it feel?”

Newt leans on the chair and starts to push it, ignoring Arthur’s offer. “Technically, we haven’t started working together yet. You’re really horny for this mission, huh?”

“Well, I wonder where I got that from,” Hermann mutters. “We can start discussing it on the way. This’ll be the only time we have to talk in private before we see Marshal Hansen.”

“Has he come to see you yet?” Newt asks. He sure hasn’t visited Newt. Not that he expected it. The marshal’s a busy guy, running a Shatterdome and a resistance movement. Newt’s got no idea what state the man’s in after ten years. He’s surprised to see him still in charge, to be honest. He thought Herc would’ve retired to a sheep farm long ago.

“No, he hasn’t, and I’m rather glad of that. Even if he told Tendo to invite me, it’s rather embarrassing to show up half-dead on the man’s doorstep on the run from my job.” Trust Hermann to be embarrassed about getting shot.

“Nah, you’re a goddamn hero. Again. Do you think the Moyulan PPDC froze your pay?” Newt asks suddenly. “And is this dome gonna pay you? I bet you could collect two checks from the PPDC, at least for a week or two.”

Hermann laughs. “That isn’t exactly high on my list of priorities, Newt.”

“I’m sure as hell not getting paid anymore. You have to provide for me.” Even though he’s kidding, he gets a little heart flutter at the idea of living with Hermann and buying things together. With a clear head, he’s allowing himself to honestly consider things he’s only fantasized about for the last nine years. He’s looking forward to the future, not dreading it or wishing he was dead. And he feels even better around Hermann.

Arthur, who’s been silent as he leads them through the halls, turns back to look at Newt. He just winks at Newt. Newt grins. He’s not chained up in a basement anymore, he gets to talk to more than one person, he’s back on his meds, and to top it all off, he’s kicked some alien squatters out of his head.

“Here it is,” Arthur says, stopping in front of a large door. A lit sign above the door reads LOCAL COMMAND CENTER. “Someone will be along in a sec to open it—ah, here we go.”

The door opens and a young Chinese tech that Newt doesn’t recognize peers out. He looks momentarily starstruck at seeing Drs. Geiszler and Gottlieb, and then straightens up and hands them two ID badges.

“Hello, Doctors. Please put these on to be granted clearance.”

Newt quickly inspects his as he pins on his own and then helps Hermann. They look to have some kind of microchip on them that will activate as soon as they cross the threshold. They’re of a new enough tech that they can’t yet be replicated. Could Hermann whip something up, though…?

“This way, Doctors,” the tech welcomes them in, politely addressing both of them even though Newt is pushing Hermann. Newt waves goodbye to Arthur and then enters the biggest LOCCENT he’s ever seen. Despite the purportedly low number of people who have security clearance, it’s still swarming with techs and higher-up personnel. Their technology isn’t top of the line like Newt vaguely knows he worked with at Shao Industries. Still, it’s serviceable stuff that’s been updated a few times since the war. The dim light is dark blue, and most illumination comes from screens or holographs.

A knot of familiar people look up and start heading over to greet them. The young tech gulps and melts back to his workstation as Dr. Kahale gets to Newt and Hermann first.

“I’m glad you two are here,” she says, putting a hand on Hermann’s shoulder. Newt notices that she’s familiar without being overly touchy. Just like what Hermann likes. _Not jealous, not jealous_ , Newt reminds himself. She looks up him and smiles.

“Hi, Newt. I haven’t seen you in a few days. Are they treating you right, or do I have to beat someone up?”

“Stop offering to beat people up, Iolana,” Hermann says affably. “Honestly, I sometimes think you’d be better as a Jaeger pilot than a Breach physicist.”

“Ah, but who could match my intellect enough to drift with me?” Iolana asks loftily. “Oh, I think we should talk to Amara after this. She and Vik weren’t invited to this meeting and she’s upset about it.”

Iolana doesn’t get anything else in edgewise before Tendo, Marshal Hansen, Raleigh, and Mako come to greet them. There’s a flurry of greetings and back-slapping for a few moments. In a lull in conversation, Herc looks at Newt and Hermann in turn with his level gaze. His hair and beard, cut in a more professional style, have both gone gray, and he’s wearing glasses that he didn’t have before. _We’ve all gotten older_ , thinks Newt.

“I can’t thank you enough for coming,” Herc says to them. “I know it was at great personal risk to you both, and you’ll continue to be breaking the law as long as you’re here. I wouldn’t have asked you to come if I didn’t think you deserved it. And we need your help.” His eyes flick up to Newt’s face, and Newt feels the weight of a fatherly gaze. It wasn’t something he’d exactly been missing. Newt’s always struggled with authority figures, especially ones he barely knows like Marshal Hansen. He does miss Stacker Pentecost, though – someone who pushed him to be better when he needed to, or was in his corner when they were cutting K-sci funds.

“You’re key to all this, Dr. Geiszler. Do you feel up to it?”

“I have to be,” says Newt. For the first time, he feels nervous about the upcoming plan. “I’m probably the person who wants the Precursors gone the most. Anything to get them off Earth.”

“That’s what I was hoping you’d say.” Herc nods in approval. “Dr. Gottlieb. You gave up everything to get here. Also, you’re defying your dad again.” There’s a twinkle in his eye until he bows his head. “Thank you.”

Herc turns and leads the group towards the main window, which looks out across the Jaeger flight deck towards the Sydney bay. It’s the first time Newt’s seen the water, since they arrived at night, and he notices a flurry of construction close by. The site of Obsidian Fury’s attack, where Mako almost died. He swallows, and unconsciously grips Hermann’s shoulders.  Hermann puts a hand on his, whether to comfort him or get him to loosen his grip. Either way, it works and Newt relaxes somewhat.

“We’ve got a little presentation prepared,” Herc says, directing Newt’s attention towards a holo table display. Dr. Kahale is queuing something up on it. “Sec-Gen Mori will outline the plan, and Dr. Kahale will provide scientific context. Please, take it away.”

Dr. Kahale doesn’t look at all nervous, which doesn’t surprise Newt. Other than the fact that she keeps glancing towards Mako, she looks confident and almost smug. Mako, too, has an air of confidence and leadership. Newt didn’t notice it before when she used to come to Shao’s labs. He didn’t notice a lot of things. Now he focuses as Mako outlines their plan.

“Mr. Choi, Drs. Kahale, Gottlieb, and Geiszler, and Raleigh as an escort, will fly to Siberia in a shuttlecraft. We want to keep as low a profile as possible. So no Jaegers. The PPDC still might notice someone flying from this shatterdome to a recent combat zone, so as a distraction just before you leave, I’ll reveal that I’m still alive.”

Hermann raised his hand, and Mako paused to nod to him.

“Do to the rest of the PPDC know that there is still a Breach open in Siberia?” he asks.

“No, Sydney’s kept most of their files on that encrypted,” Iolana says, a hint of pride

entering her voice. “And all the research I’ve brought has stayed on an encrypted hard drive.”

Mako nods. “With any luck, you’ll have the Breach closed and be back here before the

PPDC even notices. Now, about closing the Breach. Dr. Kahale, if you would?”

Iolana waves her hand over a holo table, and a simulation that looks like a sideways Breach pops up. Iolana gestures to it. “This is my rendition of what I believe the Breach looks like. I wish I had more data on it. Unfortunately, it would be risky to travel up there more than once and risk the rest of the PPDC finding out about it and expanding it. You might have to try a few different things in order to get it to close. More on those in a minute. Based on the information Drs. Geiszler and Gottlieb gathered, we know that this isn’t a physical Breach. Dr. Gottlieb’s been calling it the Drift Breach because so far, the only things that have gotten through have been the Precursors’ thoughts.” She looks Newt dead in the eye and says, “The only way we’re going to know where it is is you, Newt. I theorize that you’ll be able to tell your own proximity to it.”

“Because I’ll feel the Precursors,” Newt says. His mouth is dry. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

“So, how do we close it?” Iolana posits. “Dr. Gottlieb, Mr. Choi, and I will work on that when we get up there. Since the only thing that’s gotten through so far is the drift, drifting is likely going to be the way to close it.”

Newt had a feeling she was going to say that. Still, he takes a short inhale of breath, a little half-gasp. “How are you gonna cut the drift off? You think I wouldn’t’ve done that if I could?”

Iolana gestures to Tendo, who steps forward. “Based on the drift studies conducted by Dr. Miller, there is a way to permanently sever a drift. But only with special equipment, and only when two people are drifting. So far, we don’t have a way to expunge the drift from someone’s brain.”

“Like a drift with a dead partner,” Raleigh speaks up. He’s not the only one in the room with a dead drift partner. Tendo nods towards him uncomfortably.

“Exactly. So that’s what we’re going to try with Newt.”

“That’s not gonna close the drift breach, though, if I’m following right,” says Newt, his mind racing. He can feel it click into science overdrive, which would be an amazing and welcome feeling if they weren’t discussing a subject so abhorrent to him. He’ll have to breach with the Precursors again, they’ll be crawling around in his mind and seeing his new, free memories… “It’ll just cut our connection. They’ll still be able to get through to someone else they drifted with. Which is, well, Hermann.”

He’s glad he can’t see Hermann’s face. He doesn’t want to contemplate such an awful possibility. To be free and with Hermann again, only for Hermann to be taken over whenever the Precursors find out how to do it.

“That’s only stage one,” says Iolana. “Once I get a reading on the Breach – if I can get a reading on it – I’ll be able to tell better what’s going to close it. If it’s a version of drifting, then it should be able to be damaged with a version of the drift cutter. Tendo and I will work on redirecting the cutter’s effects so once we get a hold on them through Newt, we can follow that through and damage the Breach.”

“One more question, Dr. Kahale,” says Hermann. He hasn’t loosened up enough that he can say his coworkers’ first names in a serious setting. “Will this involve me drifting with Newton at all?”

Iolana looks so pained at his question that she actually winces. “If it comes to that, Hermann, then yes. I will do whatever is necessary to close this Breach.”

Newt actually does lean over to look at Hermann’s face now, and is able to catch his resolute nod.

“Good,” Hermann says. “So will I.”


End file.
